Re: Unity 3.1(5) to 4.0(2) Upgrade

williamka · ‎08-25-2006

We are beginning to plan to upgrade from 3.1 to 4.0 Unity with Exchange backend. Does anyone know of any issues which may have been omitted in the Cisco documentation which I need to be aware of? Any help would be greatly appreciated...

Hin Lee · ‎08-25-2006

Make sure windows is working correctly - such as DNS and no warnings or errors in the event viewer

Make sure Unity is not having any problems before you upgrade. You can perform the AdSchemaUpdate before your actual upgrade - the reason is that if you have a big AD, this step could take a while to finish.

Why upgrade to 4.0(2) when you can go to 4.1(2)?

williamka · ‎08-28-2006

Upgrading from 3.1(5) all the way to 4.1(2)? I would think there would be integration issues going that far forward and havent seen any docs written to upgrade from 3.1 to 4.2.

Ginger Dillon · ‎08-28-2006

Hi -

The Unity reconfiguration and upgrade guide does a pretty good job of assessing the caveats of moving forward with your upgrade plans - http://www.cisco.com/en/US/customer/products/sw/voicesw/ps2237/products_upgrade_guides_chapter09186a0080205abd.html#wp1334870

Check out the guide link. If you have Exchange 5.5 today or want to go to Windows 2003 on the Unity servers, you will want to check out the Caution areas. We went from 3.1(5) to 4.0(5) when 4.0(5) became available. You'll want to skip 4.0(4) as there were a number of bug fixes. Going to FLEX licensing from the USB key was not the problem I thought it might be. We upgraded from 4.0(5) to 4.2(1) this past April, really a piece of cake! You'll want to do your homework of course and run all of the prep - DBWalker, DiRT Backup, Break mirror set etc. But definitely do-able over a weekend - we did so for three servers. Also, if you use Unity Assistant, the web interface/URL for the user changes in 4.X (ciscopca). If you have the chance to install a demo 4.2 server in a lab environment, you can prep your users with advanced notification. We did this via a web site and had it published to our users about one month prior to the upgrade. This helped immensely. 4.2 has a lot of new features!

Ginger

williamka · ‎08-31-2006

Thank you for the information ... it was very useful.

We are targeting upgrade in a couple of weeks and was wondering if the SQL SP version used was upgraded as well? The 3.1(5) SQL SP version is 2.Did you upgrade SP on SQL and OS at the same time of upgrade or did the upgrade kit do this for you?

Ginger Dillon · ‎09-02-2006

Hi -

Running the 4.2 CUSPA will install all of the necessary service packs, including SQL. When I did my upgrade from 3.1(5) to 4.0, I created not only a separate backup of the Unity databases, but also Microsoft's default ones. Your Unity server should be running the SQL backup, but this doesn't include Microsoft. I copied the whole SQL directory off to a networked drive (as another safety measure). The SQL upgrade takes about 15-20 minutes, so be patient :-)

Ginger

williamka · ‎09-06-2006

Thank you for the information... We are getting a high degree of pressure to upgrade asap. I know the database is dependent upon the size of voice mail users.... but how long in time did the upgrade take? We have about 260 VM accounts. If given approval we may do this upgrade during the off hours during the week if the upgrade doesnt take too long.

Ginger Dillon · ‎09-06-2006

Hi -

Since you have Exchange off-box, run the DiRT and do not back up inbox information (note - I would schedule a separate backup of your Exchange and Unity server using Veritas or whatever backup agent software you have). When we did our upgrade, we had about 400+ unified messaging subscribers, but we also moved to 4.0(3) on a new server. Therefore, I scheduled the entire weekend to complete the move. I would suspect you'd want to allocate at least 4-8 hours, just to account for any issues you may need to research or address with TAC.

Ginger