Considerations when Upgrading to System Center 2012 - Operations Manager
Updated: May 13, 2016
Applies To: System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager, System Center 2012 - Operations Manager, System Center 2012 SP1 - Operations Manager
This section of the Design and Planning material covers key concepts and considerations for upgrading to System Center 2012 – Operations Manager or System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 (SP1), Operations Manager. Complete upgrade scenarios and procedures are found in Upgrading to System Center 2012 - Operations Manager.
The supported upgrade path is from System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 to System Center 2012 – Operations Manager, and then to System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 (SP1), so customers may have to perform multiple upgrades. Considerations when performing multiple upgrades include system requirements that do or do not overlap between System Center 2012 – Operations Manager and SP1. For example, you will want to consider what versions of SQL Server are supported and how moving across versions of SQL Server will be required as you upgrade across versions of Operations Manager.
If you have not reviewed Getting Started with System Center 2012 - Operations Manager or System Requirements for System Center 2012 - Operations Manager, you may want to before continuing. These documents contain key concepts and important configuration details you will find helpful as an upgrading customer.
Note
Unified Installer is a utility designed to perform new, clean installations of System Center 2012 for testing and evaluation purposes only. If you want to upgrade from an existing System Center installation or choose any set up options such as high availability or multi-server component installs, we recommend you refer instead to the procedures detailed in the deployment guides for each individual System Center 2012 component.
RMS Removal and the New RMS Emulator
In Operations Manager, the single largest change impacting design and planning is the removal of the root management server (RMS). All management servers are peers now that there is no RMS. Therefore, the RMS is no longer a single point of failure as all management servers host the services previously hosted only by the RMS. Roles are distributed to all the management servers. If one management server becomes unavailable, its responsibilities are automatically redistributed. An RMS emulator role provides for backwards compatibility for management packs targeting the RMS. If you do not have any management packs that previously targeted the RMS, you will not need to make use of the RMS Emulator.
Preparing for Upgrade
Before upgrade:
Important
Before you follow any of these procedures, make sure that you verify that the servers in your Operations Manager 2007 R2 management group meet the minimum supported configurations for System Center 2012 – Operations Manager. This will help you determine whether you need to add any new servers to your management group before you upgrade. For more information, see Supported Configurations for System Center 2012 – Operations Manager.
In a distributed management group upgrade, you upgrade the secondary management servers, the gateways, and agents. The order of agent upgrade depends on how the agents were deployed. If you installed the agents manually, you upgrade the agents before you upgrade the management servers and gateways.
Remove Agents from Pending Management
Check the Operations Manager 2007 R2 RMS for Active Connected Console
Disable Notification Subscription
Stop the Connector Services or Disable any Connector
These procedures are outlined in detail in Pre-Upgrade Tasks for Operations Manager
AD Integration and Agents
If you have any agents reporting to the RMS, move them to secondary management servers to take the agent work. It is important to manually upgrade your agents first. These procedures are outlined in detail in Checklist: Distributed Upgrade (Complex)
Data Warehouse
Data warehouse is now required; this is new for System Center 2012 – Operations Manager and is included in all sizing scenarios in the Operations Manager Sizing Helper
While upgrading, the UI will direct you to add a data warehouse if one does not exist.
Resource Pools
A resource pool is a collection of management servers, or gateway servers, used to distribute work amongst themselves and take over work from a failed member.
Due to the introduction of resource pools, we recommend that all management servers be connected by a low latency network. This means that if you are currently using management servers in multiple datacenters or sites we recommend you move all management servers to a single data center and use gateway servers at the other sites.
You should always have two management servers in ANY environment. A second management server allows for failover and easy restore. All management servers are members of the All Management Servers Resource pool, which balances the monitoring load of your management group as new management servers are added, and provides automatic failover for monitoring. SeeDistributed Deployment of Operations Manager for complete details.
Make sure the SDK Service is running on all management servers and that any SDK client (console, web console, connector, PowerShell) can connect to it. In System Center 2012 – Operations Manager, setup sets this service to automatically start on every management server during installation. We support any SDK client connecting to any management server.
Network Monitoring
See Considerations when Designing a Management Group for Network Monitoring for information regarding management packs and running Network Discovery.