I'm looking to upgrade our CMS environment to latest (we're 7.5 SP1 HF5 right now, no site servers just one NS server and separate SQL box). I dread these upgrades and only do them once a year because I've never had one go smoothly.
Here's a thread I posted of issues I went through when upgrading to SP1 HF5 and all my deploy tasks broke. If anyone has any tips of any items that should be manually backed up prior to upgrade (or a doc somewhere), I'd love the info. I also put a ticket in with more specific questions below. We are happy with Bomgar, so loss of pcanywhere is fine.
1) We rely heavily on deployment of images and patching. Are there any big known bugs with these products that I should not upgrade? We are stable right now. I don't use deployanywhere, if that matters.
2) is there a document spelling out what I should manually backup ahead of the upgrade? On various upgrades I've lost image files, I've lost the files inside of 'copy file' jobs, etc.
3) Will the SIM install products in the correct order for me? It looks like right now it's prompting me to install 7.6. I assume after I do that I should do any/all available hotfixes? Do I need to wait a day between installing 7.6 and installing hotfixes (someone in support had suggested that on prior upgrades).
4) What is best practice for the client agent upgrade policies? is that written somewhere that those should be disabled on upgrade, then should you enable on one test a few clients to make sure all is working before enabling for all clients? I've previously just let the upgrade policies stay on, but I didn't know if this is risky if something blows up.
I found this - https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.DOC8146.html but it's so much to pour through.
My biggest worries really are what should I backup that the upgrade might hose/trash and if anything is broken in the current release that should cause me concern. thanks for any thoughts.