My Experience of Upgrading to Service Manager 2012 SP1 from Service Manager 2012 RTM

Article
01/19/2013

Last week, System Center 2012 SP1 became generally available – Download, New Features and release Details available here. The day after release, I assisted a customer in upgrading successfully from System center 2012 – Service Manager to System Center 2012 SP1 – Service Manager, and I wanted to share my observations together with some tips and guidance to help others with upgrading.

Good luck with your upgrade!!!

Important Notes

1) DO NOT ATTEMPT to update multiple management servers simultaneously. Allow the DWMS to complete, before moving onto a MS. There is a known issue doing this with SCOM Management servers, and although I have not ran into the same issue yet with SCSM (yet Smile ) , I would not risk it for the trade off of letting each Management Server complete, before moving on to the next Management Server

2) The Data Warehouse Management Server is updated BEFORE the Service Manager Management server – This is the opposite to how you would’ve installed the product originally.

3) If you have other System Center Components, please note the Suite component Order as described at this link:

https://technet.microsoft.com/library/jj628203.aspx

4) Service Manager (and in fact all of the System Center 2012 components) must be at System Center 2012 Update Rollup 2, before you can do an in-place upgrade to 2012 SP1

5) Make sure you have everything backed up (mainly the encryption keys, all databases and all unsealed management packs) that you may need, should things not go quite according to plan (it happens occasionally, right?! Smile ). Details about Preparing for a DR situation can be found here: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/library/hh524274.aspx

6) You will need SQL 2012 analysis Management Objects (listed on this page as Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012 Analysis Management Objects) on the management servers. There will be a link to this in the SP1 update pre-requisites checker, but, if you install the Analysis Management objects from there, you will need to restart the upgrade setup rather than just re-check, in order for the pre-requisite checker to pick it up (and this would mean you re-entering your product key again) so best just to get it on, before you even start.

7) There is one media which is used both for brand new 2012 SP1 installs, and in-place upgrades.

8) Be sure to look at ALL the documentation, as it is spread out over different links, and different steps apply to different situations and environments. The intent of this blog is to bring some of this together. Here are the docs to look at:

Upgrading System Center 2012 – Service Manager to System Center 2012 SP1 – Start here to check the order of upgrade if you have other components of the System Center 2012 suite like Ops Mgr, Config Mgr, Orchestrator etc.

For more detail on this, be sure to check the Upgrade Sequencing for System Center 2012 SP1 link and please note that on the left hand side in the navigation bar, you will see a link for each component outlining suite compatibility notes and considerations. For instance, here is the one for Service Manager

Next take a look at the Upgrade Planning for System Center 2012 – Service Manager link and the sub-pages shown on the left navigation tree about upgrading the self service portal, connectors and the reporting DLL on the remote SQL Server Reporting Service

Next go to the Upgrade to System Center 2012 SP1 – Service Manager link which links to How to prepare a Service Manager 2012 for Upgrade to Sp1 and the How to Upgrade to System Center 2012 Sp1 – Service Manager pages.

Once you’re done with your successful upgrade, you will want to take a look at this page – After Upgrading to System center 2012 SP1 – Service Manager to take care of post-install tasks.

The Failed Upgrade in System Center 2012 SP1 – Service Manager page will give you some tips if anything goes wrong along the way.

OK, so taking all of the above into account, these are the steps I came up with (which may need to be adapted for your scenario / environment)

Generic High-level steps for an SP1 upgrade:

NOTE as described above Orchestrator should be upgraded prior to Service Manager.

1) Prepare for upgrade by disabling DW jobs and confirming they have stopped running:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj900186.aspx

2) Remove any 2007 R2 or 2012 SCOM agents on any of the management servers (a compatible SCOM 2012 agent will be installed as part of the SP1 upgrade)

3) Copy new 2012 SP1 Reporting DLL (if SSRS is remote to DWMS):

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj900198.aspx

4) Upgrade DW MS

5) Upgrade MS

6) Upgrade Console(s)

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj900202.aspx

7) Restart dw jobs and complete post-install steps:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj900190.aspx

8) Upgrade Self-Service Portal

Basically an in-place upgrade: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj900201.aspx.

9) Configure SCOM agents to report to the SCOM Server (if applicable)

My experience and observations

With my first upgrade from 2012 to 2012 SP1 (at a customer site Smile ), we had the following environment (Note the steps may be different depending on where you have various components installed)

4 Servers (not the real names of course!!):

SMMSSQL (Service Manager Management Server, SQL hosting ServiceManager)

DWMSSQL (Data Warehouse Management Server, SQL hosting DW databases. SQL Reporting Services)

SMSSP (Web Content Server)

SHAREPOINT (SharePoint Web parts)

High-Level Plan

So this is the high-level plan I came up with, and the one that we followed (detail and observations from each step below) :

1) Ensure DR / backups are taken care of.

2) Prepare for upgrade by disabling DW jobs and confirming they have stopped running:

3) Upgrade DW MS

4) Upgrade MS

5) Upgrade Console(s). Remember your consoles would need to go to UR2 prior to being updated to 2012, so another option is to just uninstall the 2012RTM console and then install a 2012 Sp1 console using the media.

6) Restart dw jobs and follow post-install steps.

7) Upgrade SSP

Detail of these Steps and Observations along the way

1) Ensure DR / backups are taken care of.
Same as Important Note 5 at the top of this article:

Make sure you have everything backed up (mainly the encryption keys, all databases and all unsealed management packs) that you may need, should things not go quite according to plan (it happens occasionally, right?!). Details about Preparing for a DR situation can be found here: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/library/hh524274.aspx

2) Prepare for upgrade by disabling DW jobs and confirming they have stopped running:

This documentation calls for running the Service Manager Shell, but On My DWMS, there was no Console or Service Manager Shell, so instead we ran Windows PowerShell (need to run as Administrator so that the execution mode can be set) and then we were able to run all of the other commands. In the ‘After upgrade’ steps, it tells you to run the PowerShell commands through windows Powershell.

The jobs did not show as ‘Disabled’ anywhere, but they continued to show as ‘not running’ after a number of refreshes so this was good enough for me.

NOTE: It may be worth leaving your PowerShell window open when done, as you will be running the same commands but with ‘enable’ instead of ‘disable’, post-upgrade.

3) Upgrade DW MS

4) Upgrade MS

Steps 3 and 4 were pretty straight-forward following these steps:

5) Upgrade Console(s). remember your consoles would need to go to UR2 prior to being updated to 2012, so if your consoles are not yet at UR2, another option to consider is to just uninstall a previous version’s console, and then install a 2012 Sp1 console using the media.

6) Restart DW jobs and post-install steps:

In my case, the services were already started. The services will be automatically restarted as part of the update. Definitely worth checking that they came back up though! This time the documentation does have you go through windows PowerShell to restart the jobs.