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  • 1.  Best practices for upgrading from v8.2

    SILVER CONTRIBUTOR
    Posted Aug 03, 2021 01:04 PM
    We are currently @ CRM version 8.2.23.16 on premise in production.  Hence, we are five versions behind to get up to 8.2.28.11 [which is the last version in v8.2].  It appears we are many versions behind in v9.0 on premise.

    Can anyone advise what would be the best practice of upgrading to v9.0 on premise considering where we are?  Has anyone gone through an update that would be similar to ours?

    Have any of you gone from v8.2 directly to the cloud version?

    Any advise would be appreciated, we are looking for a roadmap of how to proceed.

    Thanks in advance for your help...

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    William Zukas
    Sr. CRM BA/Administrator
    Qosina Corp
    Ronkonkoma NY
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  • 2.  RE: Best practices for upgrading from v8.2

    Posted Aug 04, 2021 09:45 AM
    Hi William,

    We are presently working with a client to upgrade on-premises from v8.2 to v9.0.

    I'll address the bigger question first. You'll want to decide if you want to stay on-prem or move to the cloud. There are pros and cons to each with the largest factor being that on-prem will no longer be supported as of Jan 2026 so within the next 5 years you'll probably be moving to the cloud anyways. The move to the cloud will be more intensive than an on-prem upgrade in that you'll have to review and update any javascript that you are using as Xrm.Page as well as other parts of the syntax are deprecated for the unified interface. Additionally if there is any direct interaction with the SQL tables (integration querying the table, SSRS report with T-SQL) that will have to be addressed. Your partner might be able to recommend you to Microsoft for a migration assessment where MS will review your current environment with you and gauge the level of effort that would be required to move to the cloud. From there you will have two options:
    1. Build up a new environment from scratch the way you want it and migrate the data. This will allow you to update to best practices such as cleaning up Javascript and use Business Rules, utilize new features such as multi-select option sets and file fields, and clean up junk fields that are no longer used.
    2. Microsoft will perform a free "Lift & Shift" where they will take your current database and push it into the cloud. With this everything that you currently have will be moved. You'll need to troubleshoot any issues and build out a solution with your updates, javascript re-write, Unified Interface updates, etc. to move to your new prod environment.

    As for upgrading on-premises, it hasn't been overly complicated. The legacy application still works on v9.0 so you can ease into a Unified Interface transition at a later date. V9.1 which is available as of June I believe does require Unified Interface use but I could be mistaken on that. One catch to warn you of, there is a bug in the v9.0 base installation media. When you upgrade you will want to upgrade your Web Server without selecting an org to upgrade and then you will want to run the upgrade media to the most recent v9.0 version. After that you can go back and select the org to upgrade and it will upgrade the DB all the way to your highest version. If you upgrade the org/DB when upgrading the server it will fail.

    Hope that information helps!

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    Scott Florance
    Business Applications Consultant
    KTL Solutions, Inc, Frederick MD
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    Original Message


  • 3.  RE: Best practices for upgrading from v8.2

    Posted Aug 04, 2021 12:38 PM
    Edited by Peter Hallock Aug 04, 2021 12:38 PM
    Hi William,

    I am presently in the process of upgrading from 8.2.28.11 to 9.1.1.914. I would recommend you do not bother doing this if you are planning on moving to the cloud. You can go directly to the cloud from v8.2.

    If you are planning on staying on premise, then we did run in to one issue when upgrading to 9.1 in that we could not import data. See: This has been resolved via an early access fix.

    So far we upgraded our dev and test instance, but have now run in to an issue upgrading production. Once again, I'll need to go back to Microsoft for some help.

    Good luck,
    Peter

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    Peter Hallock
    Self-Realization Fellowship
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    Original Message


  • 4.  RE: Best practices for upgrading from v8.2

    Posted Aug 04, 2021 01:50 PM
    Hi, William.  We recently completed an upgrade from v8.1.1 to v9.0.23, both on-premises.  It took us over a year to complete the upgrade to four deployments - sandbox, dev, test and prod.  Note, we also enabled IFD at the same time we upgraded each environment, so that added some extra steps and headaches for us.  Our original deployment and upgrade deployment both consisted of 2 front-end servers, 2 async servers and one SQL server that also ran reporting services.  Some of the largest learnings / take-aways from our experience:
    1.  We had to introduce 2 jump servers:  one for v8.2.2 and one for v9.0.6.  Each of these were full CRM deployments (all services and SQL Server on a single server).  We migrated each organization DB from 8.1.1 to 8.2.2 to 9.0.6 to 9.0.23.
    2.  Dedicate at least 16GB RAM and 2CPU to the jump servers.  We started off with just 8GB on each and increased to 16GB on each, which took the upgrade time from 8 hours to 1.25 hours for each organization on each jump server.
    2.  TLS1.0 still needs to be enabled on your new servers to complete the installation.
    3.  The 'Windows Search' service needs to be enabled on the new servers.
    4.  Late in our testing of v9.0.23, we found that we were not able to import / export data and solutions.  Some times an IIS reset would clear the issue, but it would always come back.  This was fixed in v9.1.1.914.  So within a month after upgrading our Prod deployment, we had to do an in-place upgrade to all deployments so that we could promote solutions and import / export data.
    5.  Be prepared to engage your CRM vendor or MS Support for help with these.  During our first upgrades of our Sandbox and Dev deployments, we ran into many errors (too many to list here) when upgrading from v8.2.2 to v9.0.6 and from v9.0.6 to v9.0.23.  
    6.  If you have full-text search for quick find enabled, disable it and allow the index management system job to run before starting the DB migration.

    There were some other road-blocks that we encountered, but they were more environmental that were specific to our server and network infrastructure.  I very highly recommend testing the upgrade process in a separate, throw-away environment to work out any kinks along the way, and take lots of detailed notes.  We did this (our Sandbox deployment is throw-away), and still ran into some minor issues with our Dev and Test upgrades, but it gave us 3 trial runs before upgrading our Prod deployment, which completed without any issues.

    Good luck with your upgrade!

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    Nicholas Hohenwarter
    Virginia Credit Union
    Richmond VA
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    Original Message


  • 5.  RE: Best practices for upgrading from v8.2

    TOP CONTRIBUTOR
    Posted Mar 23, 2022 04:22 AM

    Hi Nicholas and all,

    I am hoping one of you may have seen the issue we are facing at the moment...  We have just finished upgrading on premise from 8.2 to 9.1 and all went well.  However now we are finding an issue where system jobs back up, causing workflows to not run, etc.

    When I check the server, there is no issue with resources - plenty of RAM free and near zero CPU usage but if I restart the CRM Async service, around 1,000 system jobs process immediately.  Then no more until I restart the service again and another 1,000 jobs process.

    I can clear the backlog in this manner, but it's not a way to run the system!

    has anyone seen similar behaviour or have an idea where we could look to try and fix this issue?

    The jobs are a mix of workflows, Rollup fields calculating and all the other tasks that happen each day.



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    Simon West
    Nett Sales LLP
    Aldbourne
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    Original Message


  • 6.  RE: Best practices for upgrading from v8.2

    Posted Mar 23, 2022 02:56 PM
    Hi, Simon.  I actually saw your post about this issue last week.  I tried to reply, but I was unable to login to send a response.
    We did run into this same issue in our Dev environment shortly after we upgraded to v9.1.1.914.  Oddly, though, that was the only environment that was affected, but it's also our only environment where the front-end and async services are on the same server.  We engaged our CRM support vendor and they tried to adjust some of the async process settings without any luck.  We eventually opened a case with Microsoft, who declared that it was a bug in the v9.1.1.914 build.  The bug was fixed in v9.1.3.11.  If you're on a version that is older than 9.1.3.11, then you may want to try applying a more recent update. If you're not able to update at this time, or if you are on a newer version, then you may have to open a case with Microsoft to see if there's a work-around.

    Best regards,
    Nick

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    Nicholas Hohenwarter
    Virginia Credit Union
    Richmond VA
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    Original Message


  • 7.  RE: Best practices for upgrading from v8.2

    TOP CONTRIBUTOR
    Posted Mar 25, 2022 10:43 AM

    Thanks Nick,

    Like you I have been unable to log into this group for the past week!

    I eventually raised this issue with Microsoft Support and they suggested upgrading to 9.1.4.31 for me.  Having done this update 48 hours ago, I have not seen any issues since, so I'm inclined to think my issue is solved too.  Just in case it helps others, this instance was also running with front end and sync services on the same server but strangely other databases on the server remained unaffected.

    But I'm leaving the case open till next week to be sure!

    Thanks for your input too.

    Cheers,
    Simon



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    Simon West
    Nett Sales LLP
    Aldbourne
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    Original Message


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