• Article

Tip: Find Upgrade Issues Before Upgrading to SharePoint 2010

Follow Our Daily Tips

• facebook.com/TechNetTips
• twitter.com/TechNetTips
• blogs.technet.com/tnmag

SharePoint Server 2007 Service Pack 2 includes a new Stsadm.exe operation preupgradecheck. Pre-upgrade check can scan your existing SharePoint Server 2007 environment for problems that may prevent a successful upgrade to SharePoint Server 2010. It is not a best practices analyzer, but it does provide a wealth of information about your server farm. It processes rules and scans your current environment, outputting results to %CommonProgramFiles%\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\Config\Preupgradecheck.

Many potential issues that might otherwise be missed—such as custom field types—will be reported by the tool. But unlike the process of upgrading to SharePoint Server 2007, upgrading to SharePoint Server 2010 does not require the tool to be run. However, you should always run the Pre-Upgrade Check tool before upgrading.

To run the pre-upgrade checker, do the following:

  1. Install Service Pack 2 for your SharePoint Server 2007 installation.
  2. Install the October 2009 Cumulative Update for SharePoint Server 2007.
  3. Execute stsadm.exe -o preupgradecheck from a server in the farm.
    Stsadm.exe is located in %CommonProgramFiles%\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\Bin.
  4. Verify preupgradecheck is running.

When the action completes, an Internet Explorer window should automatically open displaying the Pre-Upgrade Check report.

In addition to the default behavior, there are advanced options you can use when running the Pre-Upgrade Check tool. Note that you can execute the command only for the server where you are running Stsadm.exe. You can create custom rules that define what will be checked and the level of verbosity in the report. The following are the object names that are provided for use in the tool:

  • ServerInfo Displays all farm servers referenced in the configuration database. For an upgrade to complete successfully, all members of the farm must be online. If you have a crashed server, you must remove it from the farm before completing the upgrade process.
  • FarmInfo Displays all farm components. This includes servers, Web applications, content databases, sizes, and the number of site collections.
  • UpgradeType Provides supported upgrade types (in-place and database attach).
  • SiteTemplates Displays all site definitions installed. Be sure to install any new site definitions needed in SharePoint Server 2010.
  • Features Displays all features installed in the farm.
  • LanguagePacks All languages installed in SharePoint Server 2007 must be installed for SharePoint Server 2010 as well.
  • AAMURLs Displays alternate access mappings and zones.
  • OSType Displays only unsupported operating systems unless this setting is modified by a custom rule.
  • DatabaseSchema Checks to see if the schema has been modified by the user. If so, it is blocked from upgrade. The tool might eventually block other types of schema changes, such as beta versions of products.
  • DataOrphan Reports when the tool finds content orphans in the content database. (Orphans are objects with no parent relationship.)
  • SiteOrphan Displays all sites that are not referenced in the configuration database or are without a parent.
  • UnfinishedGradualUpgrade Indicates when a SharePoint Server 2007 gradual upgrade is in process on a database.
  • MissingWebConfig Checks the local server for proper Web.config files for each SharePoint Server 2007 Web application in the farm.
  • InvalidHostNames Checks the validity of all host names on the local server.
  • InvalidServiceAccount Verifies all service accounts are available.
  • DatabaseReadOnly Checks whether content database are set to read-only in SQL Server. Databases must be read/write before upgrading.
  • WYukonLargeDatabase Checks Windows Internal Database (WID) databases for size. This is not applicable to SharePoint Server 2007, only to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.
  • WYukonLargeSiteCollection Checks WID site collections for sizes greater than 4 GB. This is not applicable to SharePoint Server 2007, only to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.
  • SearchContentSourceInfo Displays all content sources for SharePoint Server 2007 Search and all start addresses. If you are performing a database attach upgrade, you’ll have to manually rebuild your content sources. This output is useful in rebuilding that information.
  • SearchInfo Lists all search servers in the farm and their role (for example, Index and Query).

From Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administrator’s Pocket Consultant by Ben Curry

Looking for More Tips?

For more tips on Microsoft products and technologies, visit the TechNet Tips library.