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ITMS 7.6 HF7 to 8.0 upgrade time

  • 1.  ITMS 7.6 HF7 to 8.0 upgrade time

    Posted Mar 29, 2016 09:56 AM

    Hi,

    Just wanted to reach out to those that have upgraded their installations to version 8 to ask roughly how long the process took.

    We were running 7.6 HF7 with CMS, SMS, DS and Asset and the whole process took just over 8 hours! I have raised a ticket with support and have had some feedback, with mention of a script that seemed to time out for 30 minutes but nothing that would categorically explain why this occured. There is at least 2 hours that cannot be accounted for, even after you tot up each phase of the upgrade process documented in the log files.

    If anyone has any figures to hand, even off the top of your head ones(!), I would be very interested to know.

    Thanks.

    Howard



  • 2.  RE: ITMS 7.6 HF7 to 8.0 upgrade time

    Posted Mar 29, 2016 01:41 PM

    Hi Howard,

    Based on my experience with the early ITMS 8 adopters there was a direct correlation to backend performance and the length of the upgrade.  I have monitored 7 environments and by no means is 8 hours acceptable.  On average the upgrade varied from 30 to 120mins.

    What pre-migration steps did you complete before the upgrade process?

    Is your environment Physical or Virtual?

    Is SQL Standalone or Clustered?

    What metrics are you getting with I/O Meter?

    Regards,

    Jason



  • 3.  RE: ITMS 7.6 HF7 to 8.0 upgrade time

    Posted Mar 30, 2016 02:46 AM

    Hi,

    Our last upgrade which was from 7.5 SP1 HF3 to 7.6 HF4 took us around 9 hours. This in a environment with one parent and 5 child servers. And this is not unusual. I have not seen any shorter than this in the past. I also always here about that the upgrade process was speeded up but I have seen it in real.

    Even in our test environment with few clients it can easily take 2 hours and there is not much load on that system and not many items to be migrated.

    Of course I see one thing which Symantec introduced which makes the upgrade process take longer as you are forced to always go to the latest HF before being able to upgrade to the latest version. So last upgrade we did was kind of three upgrades in one.

    So now when I am planning for the 8.0 upgrade I am doing it in two steps. I will go to the lastest HF first and then maybe one or two months later I will take the step to upgrade to 8.0. However I actually do not like this because this means I have to through our internal change process twice and all the other steps involved with an upgrade twice.... But yes hopefully I can reduce the downtime / upgrade time to more acceptable 30 to 120 minutes.

    Stefan



  • 4.  RE: ITMS 7.6 HF7 to 8.0 upgrade time

    Posted Mar 30, 2016 03:46 AM

    Hi Alex,

    I am going to monitor this when I install HF7 in the test environment. What can I do when I see this happening? Or is there anything to be done beforehand to prevent this?

    Stefan



  • 5.  RE: ITMS 7.6 HF7 to 8.0 upgrade time

    Posted Mar 30, 2016 03:56 AM

    Our environment is very simple: 1 SMP server and 1 SQL server, both virtual with 16GB memory and 10GB connections to NetApp and Isilon storage.

    This was the information support dug out of the log files I provided:

    Review results of the available evidence (SMIM logs, SMP logs and MSI log).
    MSI installation started at 14.03.2016 12:28:02 and ended 14.03.2016 19:30:15.
    Total of 103 MSI files were installed/upgraded.

    Longest installing components:
    33 components of the Symantec Managment Platform 8.0 - 2 hours.
    Platform Core Upgrade 8.0 Language Pack x64 (8.0.2298) - 57 minutes
    Having reviewed the MSI log altiris_nsupgradelanguages_8_0_x64.msi it looks like the RestoreNSPauseState custome action in the MSI times out after 30 minutes.
    This action runs a VBScript. Service operations on a busy system are often slow and can time out.

     PatchManagementUpgradeLanguages x64 (8.0.2229) - 20 minutes
    Altiris CMDB Solution 8.0 (8.0.2228) - 20 minutes
    Altiris Asset Management Solution 8.0 (8.0.2228) - 16 minutes
    Altiris Patch Management Solution 8.0 (8.0.2229) - 30 minutes
    Altiris Activity Center 8.0 (8.0.2220) - 14 minutes

    Database configuration started 19:30:15 and ended 20:21:26.

     

    None of our previous upgades took this long. I have run pretty much every version since 7.5 came out, including all hotfixes. Typically it was about an hour to 1.5 hours to upgrade.



  • 6.  RE: ITMS 7.6 HF7 to 8.0 upgrade time

    Broadcom Employee
    Posted Mar 30, 2016 05:19 AM

    Hi Stefan,

    I'm afraid if you've already ran into situation with mlns of win installer handles then nothing can be done, you will need just wait. It happens pretty seldom and per current understanding that might be an issue with msiexec handles leakage. 

    Before install/upgrade you may check msiexec process - if it uses a lot of handles already then it might be good to restart "Windows Installer" service.

    Thank you,

    Alex.



  • 7.  RE: ITMS 7.6 HF7 to 8.0 upgrade time

    Broadcom Employee
    Posted Mar 30, 2016 05:21 AM

    If you happen to see very long ITMS install or update time, please check the number of handles for the msiexec process. If you will see value close to the million or several millions then, most probably, install of each msi file in you setup will take a significant amount of time.

    Thank you,

    Alex.

    30-mar-2016--msiexec-process.png



  • 8.  RE: ITMS 7.6 HF7 to 8.0 upgrade time

    Posted Apr 01, 2016 08:15 AM

    @Alex: I have reached the 1 million mark on the handels on the parent ns now (after about 35 minutes) ;-)

    sezvm1290JPG_hf7_upgrade_msiexec_handels_2.JPG

    On the child server I saw a count of around 400'000.



  • 9.  RE: ITMS 7.6 HF7 to 8.0 upgrade time

    Broadcom Employee
    Posted Apr 01, 2016 08:37 AM

    Well, I have seen 6 mln once.. :-)

    Do you see performance degradation for the msi install\configuration time? When the issue occurs single msi install might take 12-15 minutes.



  • 10.  RE: ITMS 7.6 HF7 to 8.0 upgrade time

    Posted Apr 01, 2016 08:44 AM

    This was in the test environment and the child server took 39 minutes to install HF7 whereas the parent server took 43 minutes to install HF7. Normally in the production environment I can count with at least double the install time.

    This would men just over 1 hour on a child ns and about 1.5 hour on parent server. This seems long to me for just a HF....



  • 11.  RE: ITMS 7.6 HF7 to 8.0 upgrade time

    Broadcom Employee
    Posted Apr 29, 2016 05:29 AM

    just FYI: situation with install\upgrade time should be improved starting from Symantec Installation Manager HF1 release (8.0.79). You may still see huge amount of handles for msiexec, but overall install process should complete faster.