Vault GPS: Make All The Right Turns During Your Vault Upgrade
Vault GPS: Make All The Right Turns During Your Vault Upgrade
Vault GPS: Make All The Right Turns During Your Vault Upgrade
Upgrade
Irvin Hayes Jr. Autodesk, Inc.
PL5843-P Upgrading your replicated Vault software environment to a new release of Vault software shouldnt
be an intimidating endeavor. Building an understanding of what actually happens when clicking the install button
is crucial to having confidence in your upgrade plan. This class will cover existing and newly supported methods
for upgrading your replicated Vault software installation, and you will leave armed with the knowledge of what is
actually happening in the background with SQL so that you can proceed with confidence.
Learning Objectives
At the end of this class, you will be able to:
Understand the importance and role that SQL plays in a Vault software upgrade
Understand the out-of-the-box procedure for Vault software upgrades of replicated environments
Understand the alternate snapshot procedure for Vault software upgrades of replicated environments
Table of Contents
Learning Objectives..................................................................................................... 1
About the Speaker........................................................................................................ 1
Introduction................................................................................................................... 3
What happens with a normal vault upgrade?..................................................... 3
How it works....................................................................................................................................... 3
Understanding the obstacles........................................................................................................ 5
Planning to overcome the obstacles........................................................................................... 6
Introduction
Upgrading your replicated Vault software environment to a new release of Vault software
shouldnt be an intimidating endeavor. Building an understanding of what actually happens
when clicking the install button is crucial to having confidence in your upgrade plan. This class
will cover existing and newly supported methods for upgrading your replicated Vault software
installation, and you will leave armed with the knowledge of what is actually happening in the
background with SQL so that you can proceed with confidence.
Now lets move on to the Upgrading Vault Server step. Before we can look at a replicated
environment, we first must understand the single site environment. This single site environment
is made up of the database (SQL), Autodesk Data Management Console (ADMS) and the
Autodesk Vault File Store (AVFS).
As called out in the Autodesk Vault Upgrade guide, you need to pay attention to how many
releases you are skipping over in your migration. For example, if you are going from 2011 to
2015, you will need to go to some intermediate release. In the example, you would need to
go from 2011 to 2013 followed by 2013 to 2015. Autodesk doesnt allow you to migrate more
than 2 releases apart. I would recommend getting to the appropriate service pack or hotfix
level prior to opening up the ADMS Console during the migration process. Once you open the
ADMS Console, the migration will begin. What is going on at this phase is that the database
is being prepped for the current release. This involves updating stored procedures, tables and
restructuring data where necessary.
Now lets look at a replicated environment. It does consist of the same pieces that a single
environment entailed. However, it allows for multiple SQL locations which are known as
Connected Workgroups. Believe it or not, upgrading a replicated environment isnt that difficult.
You must first upgrade the main Workgroup, also known as the Publisher Workgroup, by
upgrading an ADMS machine within the workgroup. This starts the process of migrating the
Publisher SQL databases. Once the SQL databases is properly updated, snapshot are created.
A snapshot is a read-only view of a database at the time the snapshot was taken. This snapshot
is then consumed by the SQL subscriber machines. Once the snapshot is consumed by the
subscriber, the environment is now ready for use once all the ADMS / AVFS machines within
that workgroup have been updated accordingly with the appropriate software release. It is best
to upgrade all the ADMS machines in the subscriber workgroup first prior to moving onto the
AVFS machines.
Their databases
Hardware specifications
Once we had this information, we set up a lab environment close to what they have so that we
can better understand the pitfalls. Along with us running a series of tests in our lab they were
running similar tests in their lab. This was beneficial since it allowed us to compare notes and
focus on various differences within the environment.
During our first couple migrations we noticed that there was considerable differences in the
timings between the environments. This made us focus on the hardware. Since the migration
process is very read/write intensive, we started to focus on the hard drives. We needed to look
at what partitions the database were on and the type of RAID configuration. Another area of
focus was on memory since SQL utilizations as much as it can (you can limit the amount within
SQL itself). We monitored both of these activities use Performance Monitor to help us get a
better understanding of what is going on. We also utilized a utility called Wireshark to get an
understanding of how much data was going over the network. Upon investigating all avenues, it
was determined that we were sending too much data over the network in terms of the snapshot.
Remember the snapshot is the data that the publisher creates post migration and is updated
from time to time based on the SQL schedule. There was obstacles with the hard drive and
memory but they did not impact the total migration time as much as the network traffic did.
Planning to overcome the obstacles
Now that we understand the obstacles of the migration we were able to come up with solutions
to get around them.
The main obstacle was the network. We were able to overcome this obstacle by using the
Alternate Snapshot solution which will be discussed in the next section.
The hard drive can be handled by purchasing additional partitions or reconfigure the existing
partitions. If you are going to reconfigure the RAID partition, it is highly recommended copying
all data off the entire drive to another location prior to beginning the operation. As mentioned in
the previous section, a migration has intense read/write operations. If you are setup up a RAID
configuration, you need to make sure that it can handle a lot of read/write operations. You will
want to pull out SQLs temp database and log files to a separate partition. The main database
should be on a partition that can handle a lot of read/writes. You will want to have the log files
on a separate partition as well. Once you are satisfied with your configuration, restore your data
accordingly. NOTE: The file store is not impacted by a migration and if you are running it on the
SQL machine as well you will want it on its own partition.
Depending on your current system, you will want to have a sufficient amount of memory in the
system. If more memory is determined to be needed, prior to the migration may be the best
time to upgrade it. This way it can be fully utilized during the migration process itself. The
memory / processor upgrades is something that the business unit will need to determine if it is
worthwhile now or if the budget is even there for the upgrade.
We found that having the issues documented prior to the migration made the actual migration
run smoothly. If you are working with Autodesk or a reseller during your testing phase and
have issues, they can help you solve this problems in the test environment prior to migrating
the production environment. A documented process also allows the migration process to be
executed by anyone on the team.
NOTE: Please contact your reseller or Autodesk to make sure that whatever is being deleted
can be deleted. Autodesk or the reseller may have to create a special script in order to make
the migration run smoothly.
2. Immediately after the snapshot is created, turn off the SQL job on the remote SQL
servers using the SQL Management Studio
3. Move the snapshots to the subscriber location
4. Modify the agent to point to the Alternate Snapshot location. At the end of the command
line remove -Continuous and add -AltSnapshotFolder D:\VC_Replication_Share\ where
D:\VC_Replication_Share\ is the local path of the unc folder.
7. Wait until the snapshot consumption completes. The status of this can be viewed in the
dialog above and when it shows that it is complete.
8. Stop the SQL job
9. Set the synchronization setting back to Continuous
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Closing
Now that we know what to expect during a migration we can go forward and have a successful
migration.
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