Thursday, January 1, 2009

Perfect Storm of a CRM Upgrade

This is a post to the forums I did a while ago (edited a little). Hope it helps.

I've just completed what, I believe, amounts to the perfect storm of an upgrade. The client was moving from SBS 2003 (not R2) on a virtual machine to a physical Windows 2003 64 bit server. They were also upgrading CRM3 SBS to CRM4 Professional. As SBS was running SQL 2000 and CRM3 does not run on 64 bit machines the database couldn't be easily moved from one to the other. So we have an upgrade, migration across domains and a move to 64 bit.

The eventual path to success was the following:

1) Upgrade SQL 2000 to 2005
2) Upgrade CRM3 to CRM4 on the SBS virtual machine
3) Backup the database and transfer it to the new 64 bit server
4) Install CRM4 on the 64 bit server
5) Use deployment manager to attach the old database

Points of note:

* You can upgrade SBS SQL 2000 to 2005 but you may need to completely reinstall SRS as in my case the discs simply would not allow for SRS to be upgraded
* If you get "Malformed XML Found in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Saved Queries" this could be an issue with the saved queries table but it could also be a permissions issue. In my case the user who had installed CRM was not the domain administrator. Upgrading as the domain admin did not cut it. Promoting the original user to a domain admin and upgrading did the trick
* If you get "Action Microsoft.Crm.Setup.Server.InstallConfigDatabaseAction failed. Invalid user name. Failed to validate username for given domain. Only existing domain usernames and email addresses are allow" then try unplugging the network once the required components are installed. This cleared the error for me
* On a 64 bit box, make sure you are running IIS in 64 bit mode and therefore ASP.Net is registered in 64 bit mode. If not, CRM will get past the pre-checks, start installing and then bomb out leaving a mess which cannot be repaired, uninstalled or installed over
* Similarly do not try to install the 32 bit version of CRM on a 64 bit server. It will only lead to pain.
* The deployment manager can be used to add an organisation with the Professional license. It simply swaps out the default database for the new one and maps the users as usual (although, I again hit an issue with the setup user being someone other than domain admin. The error was "At least the setup user needs to be mapped before this organization can be imported". I had to swap map links to make it work) Good luck if you come across a similar situation ;)

1 comment:

Eugp said...

Hi,

I just did the same upgrade, wow it was tricky. Plus, I was trying to migrate the SBS 03 box to SBS 08. That failed with an AD replicatoin problem.

But what I was annoyed with and really hurt me this past Monday morning was that I had chosen to attach to existing databases rather than create new and import the organization. I fault the Implementation guide which doesn't cover redeployment at all. What really threw me was that I actually had the rig up and running Sunday night because CRM 4 was still running on the SBS 03 box so all the pointers within the attached database still worked, even though it was installed and running on the new member server x64 box. I went Yay, it works! Now I can go uninstall it from SBS 03. Opps, guess not, when I uninstalled fomr the SBS 03 the rig failed. Couldn't figure out why since it was just working. So eventually I figured out that it needed to be redployed rather than attached. MS support tried to get the attached to work, but I gave up and reinstalled and imported. Running reasonably well now.