VM Snapshot before SQL Server upgrade

  • I have recently been tasked with handling our SQL Server instances after being involved in DB2 for 10 years, so SQL Server is a bit different from what I was used to and this may seem a very basic question.

    12 of the Instance need to be upgraded to 2014 as they are on 2008R2 and I am planning an in place upgrade as there is very little appetite for a migration type upgrade in my company.

    I am planning to ask the Server Provisioning team to take a Snapshot of the VM before I attempt the upgrade.
    My question is, if I attempt the upgrade and it goes badly, will I be able to get the Server restored back to the Snapshot and will it be back to the state and version it was when taken at the snapshot?  Will it all be able to run fine from this point?

    Thanks

  • ofcourse

  • garryha - Friday, March 1, 2019 1:50 AM

    12 of the Instance need to be upgraded to 2014 as they are on 2008R2 and I am planning an in place upgrade as there is very little appetite for a migration type upgrade in my company.

    Typically, in-place upgrades carry some additional risk that migrations do not, especially jumping versions like you are (skipping 2012). I would be trying to work with your team to look at migrating to help mitigate some of these risks and add confidence to your upgrade. There is some great information in this article.

    To summarise the mains pros of migration:

    • Simplified testing of the new version.
    • Clean installation, free of artifacts from previous installs\upgrades.
    • Simplified rollback.
    • Simplified OS upgrade (if you're upgrading the OS as well).

    garryha - Friday, March 1, 2019 1:50 AM

    I am planning to ask the Server Provisioning team to take a Snapshot of the VM before I attempt the upgrade.
    My question is, if I attempt the upgrade and it goes badly, will I be able to get the Server restored back to the Snapshot and will it be back to the state and version it was when taken at the snapshot?  Will it all be able to run fine from this point?

    I have a tendency to do both VM snapshots and database backups simultaneously for any upgrade or patching task. My main reason is that I trust SQL backups the most for protecting the data in a transactionally consistent way. Snapshots using VSS and SQL Writer should be transactionally consistent, but SQL Server backups are guaranteed to be.

    In addition, what happens if your upgrade is successful for the application and 99% of your databases, but a single, low priority database was corrupted during the upgrade. This one DB might not be enough on its own to trigger a rollback, but do you want to rollback the entire upgrade for this single database? If you have SQL Server backups, you can restore that database alone rather than reverting your entire server to the previous version.

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