Strategy for staging new versions of Unity

[emlee]

Thanks in advance for all the great support and help on this site.<br><br>We are currently running 3.02 and want to upgrade to the latest version. The messages are stored off box and Unity connects to an Exchange 5.5 environment, with two call managers for call processing. <br><br>The Unity box is running Win2K, MSDE and the connector.<br><br>What is the best method for staging a Unity upgrade to test it before applying changes to the actual box? Is it as simple as pulling the mirrored drives like a CM upgrade and reverting to the old drives in case of failure? Or should be practice our disaster recovery and restore Unity to a different box and then practice upgrading on that recovered box? Can I turn off the production box late after hours and bring up the recovered box to test, or will that confuse/corrupt the Exchange servers?<br><br>

[#2]

Exchange 5.5 is going to get decidedly annoyed with you if you bring up other servers and then take them away again and the like in an effort to dry run the upgrade. Since the migration process involved removing properties from the directory (running uninstall) just slamming a mirrored drive in/out isn't going to cut it to jump back to the 2.4.x system if you want to start over. I really wouldn't go that route.

If you have the facilities I'd reccoemend doing it on a seperate test LAN off the corporate network entirely (which is what we do here in our labs when running a test migration/upgrade for a large customer before actually doing it).


Jeff Lindborg
Unity Technical Lead/Answer Monkey
Cisco Systems
lindborg@cisco.com
http://www.AnswerMonkey.net (new page for Unity support tools and scripts)