Dynamics Community Forum Thread Details

In place upgrade estimation crtiteria

Hello All,

I have to estimate an In Place upgrade project from
Feature Pack CU3 to Ax 2012 R2. Below are the
criteria I have thought upon.

What All Layers are customized and how much they
have been customized?
More the number of customized layers larger is time
taken i.e. time grows directly proportional to no.
of layers customized.

ISV/third party /system integration if any then it
need to be upgraded separately and it should also be
considered while estimating.

EP/SSRS/AIF customizations if any.

State of Database i.e. how clean is the Data?

One way of finding it out is to perform Consistency

Check in Ax(Admin module->Periodic->Database-
>Consistency check)
Larger is the inconsistencies/orphan data , more is
the time taken.

Production database Size
More is database size, larger is the time taken to
copy database i.e. directly proportional.

Existing build version of Dynamics Ax 2012 , SQL
server(Database) and Windows server.

Can somebody add some values here with his/her real
time experience. Also I would like to know how much
above factor matter when it comes to estimation.

For ex: if Database size is 40 GB, time taken for data

upgrade is 80 hours. Then what if database size is
90 GB ?

I know it is not so straightforward, but
still I am looking for best possible estimate. I
have gone thru MS upgrade guide and few blog.

Also I am assuming I have to do total 2 upgrades
i.e. 1 test and second is production system upgrade.
I would be keen to what are major challenges/hurdles
in In place upgrade that can take up lot of time? So
that I should address them in my estimates. I know
it depends upon client system as well. So here are
quick details about their system:

No. of Companies: 2

Appl Build : Feature pack 6.0.1108.670

Databse size : >=40 GB(not sure yet)

Customized layer : ISV, VAR, CUS(3000+ hours
customization)

From my experience of Ax 4.0 Sp1 upgrade to Ax 2012,
I know during that there is Data pre-processing
(which could be time consuming process) on source
system which let us know about all the
inconsistencies in Database and hence helps us in
estimation. But I am not sure how to ensure same
thing when it comes to In Place upgrade.

Thanks
Manoj Parashar

First of all upgrading from AX2012 to AX2012 R2 is not comparable with upgrading from a pre-AX2012 to AX2012. It is a totally different beast to upgrade from a different major version of AX. :-)

I wrote about my experience here:

yetanotherdynamicsaxblog.blogspot.com/.../upgrading-ax2012-to-ax2012-r2-part-2.html

The upgrade guide is currently in a very good shape. I would highly recommend spending a couple of days just preparing by analyzing the upgrade guide. There even is a downloadble poster that shows the entire process graphically. Put it up on the wall and study it. :-)

With proper preparation, you might get through it on the first go, without much hazzle. I would guess no more than a week or two, depending on the amount of code customizations. Make sure you already have R2 compatible ISV models prepared. Then you need to plan for a good testing phase before you finally update a copy of production with your new and shiny R2 modelstore.

The best of luck!

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