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Microsoft Dynamics GP (Archived)

Upgrade Path?

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Posted on by Microsoft Employee

We are upgrading from Windows Server 2003 / SQL Server 2005 / GP 9.0 to Windows Server 2012 / SQL Server 2012 / GP 2015.

I understand that I need to perform an interim upgrade to GP 2010 and then onwards to GP 2015. What I am trying to ascertain is whether I can upgrade SQL from 2005 to 2012 up front (while still using GP 9) and successfully upgrading throughout.

I know GP 9 and SQL 2012 are not officially supported, but I would like to know if anyone has any experience with this setup and encountered any major issues.

The tentative plan:

- Deploy a new Windows Server 2012 machine w/ SQL Server 2012.

- Migrate SQL 2005 -> SQL 2012. Point all of our existing Windows Server 2003 + client machines to this new database server.

- (the above setup would run in production for a short period of time)

- Install Dynamics GP 2010 on another new Windows Server 2012 machine (client install only). Use this client install to upgrade Dynamics GP 9 databases to Dynamics GP 2010.

- Install Dynamics GP 2015 on the same server as the prior Dynamics GP 2010 install. Upgrade Dynamics GP 2010 databases to Dynamics GP 2015.

We have a lot of customizations and reporting services reports. These will all be re-developed or upgraded/updated for Dynamics GP 2015 / SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services in advance of the actual upgrade so they're ready to go at that time. There is a lot of out of date customizations and reports that we plan to rationalize during the upgrade by just re-creating fresh in the new version, leaving behind anything no longer necessary.

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  • Community Member Profile Picture
    Community Member Microsoft Employee on at
    RE: Upgrade Path?

    I see that you offered to provide the steps for this process, I would appreciate seeing your steps, I am about to start a very similar project.

  • Suggested answer
    Community Member Profile Picture
    Community Member Microsoft Employee on at
    RE: Upgrade Path?

    I recently went through a similar upgrade and it went pretty smoothly. Shoot me an email and I can provide you with a copy of the path we took. mscalamogna@sdcpa.com

    At a high level, you need to upgrade to GP 9 SP5, then GP 2010 SP 4 and from there you can go to GP 2015. I did the upgrade from 9 to 2010 in WS 2003/SQL 05, then moved everything over to WS 2012/SQL 2014 box and upgraded to GP 2015. Between GP 9 and 2010, I also had to apply a service pack to SQL 2005.

    Definitely 100% do this in test and document your steps/error messages..... upgrades are like snowflakes. Each one is frustrating/face melting in its own special way. :)

    One big "gotcha" when moving databases: make sure DYNSA is the db owner for all GP databases after the move. If you move your db's then try to upgrade and DYNSA is not the db owner, the upgrade is going to fail. Here's a KB article that'll get you 90% of the way there. support.microsoft.com/.../878449

    Another big "gotcha". My customer wasn't using multicurrency in GP 9. Somewhere in the process of upgrading multicurrency was loaded, and when we started testing GP 2015 we were prompted to assign a functional currency and run check links. This process took over 12 hours to complete. If you use the distribution suite, buckle up!

    Last big "gotcha". Use your test upgrade to address any issues with your data, but also to figure out how long the whole process will take. If I could go back I would have paid closer attention to this and given myself a little more time.

    I've got the steps and all of the SQL scripts I had to run for my upgrade, and like I said I'm happy to send them to you if you want.

  • Community Member Profile Picture
    Community Member Microsoft Employee on at
    RE: Upgrade Path?

    Your plan is good, but as soon as your change the DSN entries on your clients, your users will not be able to login. This seems to be a big issue, as GP uses the server name in the DSN entry to encrypt the passwords. I tested this with GP 2010 and GP 2015 with the same results. I ended up resetting all passwords to a temp one to allow users to login and change the passwords after.

    I ended up using 2 virtual machines, one to upgrade to my latest version of GP, I had SP2 and needed SP4 and another to test to my final version. I did that upgrade on a VM so I would not touch my production server. My approach was not staged and was accomplished in a single weekend. I went from Server 2008 R2, SQL 2008 R2 and GP 2010 SP2 to, Windows 2008 R2, SQL 2012 and GP 2010 SP4,  then test migration to a VM running Windows 2012, SQL 2012 and GP 2015.

    Once I was comfortable, we did start Friday at 5:00pm, and took a few hours to upgrade a 25GB company file on my brand new physical server.

    Again, personally I would not feel comfortable running GP 9 and SQL 2012 in a production environment.

    One thing to point out, we got a brand new Dell R730, RAID 1 for Logs and OS and RAID 10 for Data. Very, very fast. Once we went live with SQL 2014 instead of SQL 2012, some of the GP Reports (Dexterity text and graphic) too a very long time. One report called Received/Not Invoiced took 42 minutes to run. After many hours of researching, I ended up turning off the Hyper-Threading at the BIOS level for the SQL server. I rebooted the server and the same report took 39 seconds.

    Good luck with your project.

    PD

  • Suggested answer
    Mick Egan Profile Picture
    Mick Egan 3,557 on at
    RE: Upgrade Path?

    From memory you would encounter issues with SQL Versions, typical message was along the lines: was this version of GP is not compatible with the SQL version, or similar a fair while back now.

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