WSS 2.0

SharePoint Upgrade - Prescan - content Migration

Penny Coventry — Thu, 31 May 2007 18:59:00 GMT

I recently received a query concerning the SharePoint content migration upgrade approach. The customer was attempting to attach the databases to a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 installation. They then tried to run prescan.exe, which complained, stating that they must have Windows SharePoint Services v2 (WSSv2) installed.

Prescan must be executed whist the content databases are in a WSSv2 (SPS03) environment, then the prescan'd databases can be upgraded using any of the three upgrade options (or is it 7 options – see Joel’s blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/05/22/3-methods-to-upgrade-let-me-give-you-4-more.aspx). What prescan does is amend the content databases so that they now contain references to the site definitions that sites were based on.

Once you do an upgrade and you remove your WSSv2 (SPS03) environment, and if there is a possibility you need data from your WSSv2 (SPS03) content databases, you must have a means of restoring your WSSv2 (SPS03) content databases, attaching them to a WSSv2 (SPS03) environment, service packed to the necessary level that matches your WSSv2 (SPS03) content. Note, you cannot attach them to a WSSv3 (MOSS 2007) database without them being prescanned, which is another reason why you need a WSSv2 (SPS03) environment. Also you can not attach a content database twice to the same WSSv3 (MOSS 2007) farm.

As a side note, Prescan does not build the xml file that maps the old site definitions to the new site definitions. That is a manual job that developers do. Chapter 25 "Upgrading Site Cutomizations and Custom Site Defintions", written by Brett Lonsdale, in the Administrator's Companion, has more details of the xml mapping files. Also refer to the Upgrade Toolkit for Windows SharePoint Services Sites and Templates Guide.

So after you run the prescan on the old boxes you only have to move the content databases, presuming you have taken care of all other upgrade/customization issues you may have.

Remember:

Prescan can only be run in a WSSv2 (SPS03) environment.
You MUST run prescan prior to upgrading your WSSv2 (SPS03) environment.
You can run prescan as many times as you like.

Prescan be down loaded from: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=e8a00b1f-6f45-42cd-8e56-e62c20feb2f1&displaylang=en

Other useful blogs include:

If you are going to TechEd 2007, Orlando, Florida – next week, and you are interested in upgrading your WSSv2 (SPS03) sites to WSSv3 (MOSS 2007), then I highly recommend that you attend the following sessions:

OFC304 - Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Upgrade and Migration, Wednesday, June 6 5:30 PM - 6:45 PM, S210 E, Shane Young
MST16-TLC - SharePoint Upgrade: Do's and Don'ts, Thursday, June 7 4:30 PM - 5:45 PM, Green Theater 4.

I’ll also be at TechEd next week, in the Office – POD (Hands-on labs North), so do come over and introduce yourself, and at the same time complete:

OFC06-TLC - Upgrade Toolkit for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Sites and Templates.
OFC07-HOL - Upgrading to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 from SharePoint Portal Server 2003.

Performing a SharePoint Gradual Upgrade using STSADM

Penny Coventry — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 15:32:00 GMT

In the Chapter 24 of the Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 Administrator's Companion, I detailed how to use the STSADM command to upgrade a number of site collections using the Gradual upgrade approach. This was based on knowledge that was available during the beta. With RTM code, the process is as follows:

Note: Ensure that the root site collection is upgraded before any other site collection in the Web Application. If multiple site collections are upgraded at one time, the root site collection must be included in the first set of site collections selected to be upgraded.

Open a command prompt and navigate to the 12 hive (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN)
Type the following command:
Stsadm –o enumsites –url http://portal –redirectedsites > c:\sites.xml
where http://portal is the name of you web site.

Note: Only site collections from one content database can be upgraded at one time, therefore the sites.xml file will need to be modified. In the example below, we need to either remove the two site collections in the protal1_Site_pair content database or the site collection http://portal/sites/obe, which resides in the OBE_DB_Pair content database, so that site collections in one content database remain.
Open sites.xml in notepad. It should contain text similar to the following:

Note: The “Count” and as all site collections should be in the same content database the “TargetDatabase” attributes are not necessary for upgrading the content databases, but can remain in the xml file, because they will be ignored by the upgrade process.
Amend the xml file so that only those site collections you wish to upgrade are present and then save and close sites.xml.
In the command prompt type:
stsadm –o upgrade -sidebyside -sitelistpath c:\sites.xml

The SharePoint Setup dialog box is displayed, and may remain displayed for some time.

My Recent experience with Multi Core Processors, using SharePoint virtual machines

Penny Coventry — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 12:47:00 GMT

Combined-Knowledge provided me with a lovely laptop when I recently taught the Mindsharp Upgrade course. It was a Toshiba Portege M400 Core 2 Duo T7200 (2.0 GHz) with 4 GB of RAM. I used it to run the virtual machines to demo the medium server farm in-place and gradual upgrade processes. One thing I noticed was that the machine was not optimized for dual processors, see "Windows XP Multi Core config - Does your OEM do it for you?". Other configurations to note with multi-core machines are:

Check the BIOS settings of your machine to ensure Hardware Virtualization is enabled, see Scott Hanselman's post: Virtual PC Tips and Hardware Assisted Virtualization
Don't use the /3GB switch in the boot.ini. (On servers that run SharePoint the "The Windows Server 2003 /3GB switch is not supported in Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 or in later versions or in SharePoint Portal Server 2003 SP2 or in later versions").
Use Virtual Server rather than Virtual PC.

Note: Although I do have a SharePoint medium server farm virtual machine configuration, I do not use this setup for day to day experimenting, as better performance is achievable when the web server and database are on the same virtual machine, see: Virtual Server Technical Library: Improving performance.

SharePoint Upgrade and the MOSS timer job delay

Penny Coventry — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 09:32:00 GMT

The day after the clocks changed, I was teaching the Mindsharp Upgrade course, in Finland at FC Sovelto for Combined-Knowledge. I had read about the DST (Daylight Saving Time) fixes, but as our virtual machines use GMT then they are not applicable. However, all the upgrade labs were taking an hour longer to complete. As a class we recognized that this could have something to do with DST and on searching the Internet found, Darrin's post, "Daylight Savings Time Strikes Back!" and the KB 932563, "One-time timer jobs will not run until one hour after the jobs were created in SharePoint Server 2007".

On the first server in the farm, the SharePoint Products and Technologies Wizard, schedules a timer job. Usually this remains in a status of Pending for a short time, before it starts the timer jobs that will sequentially upgrade the SharePoint installation. However with the advent of DST, the timer job remains in a pending status for an hour. So prior to DST, depending on the power of the student's computers, the upgrade exercises would take somewhere between 30-45 minutes, but after DST they take 90-105 minutes. This problem affects all upgrade scenarios - Window SharePoint Services 2.0 to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007.

I've done a little testing and on the Date and Time Properties dialog box, on the Time Zone tab, if the Automatically adjust clock for daylight saving changes check box is cleared, then have the hour delay in the SharePoint timer job. This may be an alternative to waiting until the official Microsoft fix is available or changing the timezone of your servers. See Stefan's post, "MOSS timer jobs delayed by one hour if system regional settings are configured for DST "as to which timezone to choose.

Please check that this does not adversely affect your implementation, for example, I don't know if I'd do this on a domain controller.

HP releases new version of their SharePoint sizing tool

Penny Coventry — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 17:16:00 GMT

Take a look at HP's SharePoint 2003 Sizing and Configuration Tool ~~V2.0~~ V3.0.

[Updated 2006/10/23 - new releases]

New Version of the CAML Query Builder - v2 - available

Penny Coventry — Mon, 30 May 2005 17:33:00 GMT

Patrick Tisseghem announced yesterday that the new version of the Caml Query Builder V2, can be downloaded from U2U Community Tools.

SharePoint version numbers

Penny Coventry — Sun, 15 May 2005 12:04:00 GMT

Sometime ago I answered a newsgroup question concerning How to find out what version of SharePoint is installed on a server, and then the other day I had to ask myself the same question, so instead of looking through all my emails everytime, I've decided to put the information on my blog - just incase you too may need to find out. I've created an article, so I can update it as new versions are released.

With that in mind, I've included the version number of Windows Server 2003 R2 beta. You can download a beta version of R2 at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/R2/trial/installinstruct.mspx. It needs an evalution copy of Windows 2003 which you can obtain from http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluation/trial/default.mspx. However take note that the evaluation copy of Windows 2003 server, from my experience, takes a long time to download. It was not a problem of the size of the pipe at my end but looks like its a restriction at the microsoft end.

Where does a SharePoint server keep note of it's config database?

Penny Coventry — Sun, 03 Apr 2005 12:07:00 GMT

I have often been asked this question. The config database holds all the information that a SharePoint installation needs, e.g., "Where are the SharePoint databases stored?", "Does the installation have a separate index/job server, and if so, what is the name of this server?", etc. However, before a SharePoint server can connect to it’s databases, it needs to know where the config database is held. Well as you might expect – the dsn definition for the config database is stored in the registry:

WSS 2.0 and SPS 2003: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\Secure\ConfigDb

WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Secure\ConfigDb

[Updated 20/10/2006 to add Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 registry entry]