We are looking to upgrade from Microsoft CRM 3.0 to CRM 2011. I’ve done a bunch of reading both online as well as through a few books (CRM 2011 Admin Bible & CRM 2011 Unleashed) and believe I understand most of the basics for the upgrade process. I was just looking to get some information on real world gotcha’s that you might have experienced or any advice you might have gathered along the way that you’d like to pass along.
Basic Info – Small Organization with fewer than 150 users. No plans to use the offline client at this point. Will be 90% running on Windows 7 X64 with Office 2010 32 bit. The rest will be on Office 2007. Our current CRM 3 environment is essentially out of the box with the exception of a custom proposal generation add in that we know will not migrate over. Our developer is working on a new one form CRM 2011.
We will use 2 WFE that will essentially be full server installs using NLB. There will be a single SQL backend without clustering. Will use log shipping for DR. Main reason for 2 WFE is for fault tolerance. WFEs will be on virtualized and will be 2 CPU each with 8G RAM. CRM 2011 will be setup with its own domain service accounts.
The SQL backend hosts our SharePoint farm as well for the same number of users. They will be installed on separate instances for security. Server uses DAS storage with separate spindles for data and log files. Quad Core, 28G RAM. It will also be the reporting server for CRM.
Both WFEs up and running with the default organization and the SQL server instance up running before we start moving forward with the upgrade.
Before we start the upgrade process we will setup a new machine with Win 2k3 R2 SP3 32 bit with a temporary SQL2005 SP3 backend server. We will back up and restore our production CRM 3 DB to the temp backend SQL server and run the redeployment tool have to essentially have a new copy of our current CRM 3 environment. The reason for this is our CRM 3 server today is buggy and I want as clean as slate as possible for the upgrade. Our Production CRM 3 environment will be shut down during this time to prevent any changes to the database.
Once we have our new CRM 3 environment I will start the upgrade to CRM 4. Once this is up and running I will verify the upgrade successful by reviewing the upgrade log for errors. After this is done I will back up the Organization DB from SQL and restore it to our SQL2008 server. I will then Import the Organization.
I have done this process as a test before and am using that as our current testing environment. I plan to go through this process two more times before we complete the upgrade and document everything along the way so that I have a solid guide for when we do the actual move.
I know this is incredibly vague so if there are any specific questions you have please feel free to let me know. I am still trying to get my head around Claims authentication and setting up ADFS so that will be another question.
I greatly appreciate any help you may provide.
Thanks,
Joe
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