E9 to E10 – Day 3: The Install

Installing Epicor ERP 10…

Time for the good bit: installing E10. It may be worth noting that I’m updating this blog in real-time now to make sure anything that comes up doesn’t get forgotten.

To say we are doing an upgrade here wouldn’t be 100% correct. The process is more like a clean install with a database migration. We want to be able to run E9 and E10 on the same server as it’s important to us that we can show the performance difference between the two versions when we’ve finished the install. Without provisioning new virtual servers we don’t have the luxury of being able to install E10 on an identical box and we don’t want any factors to be different when we perform the testing.

I should also mention that our servers are buried in a bomb shelter-like datacentre somewhere in the South of England and we don’t have the ability to stick the media in the drive to run the install. Fortunately, the E10 disk is just a disk with an executable on it so I copied the 1.6gb file across the network and double-clicked.

It’s a bit alarming to see that the first thing it does is uninstall the Administration Console and at this point I’m not sure if I’ll have any control over my E9 installation. Does it remember the settings and just add more in for E10? Time will tell.

At Insights this year a guy from Holland said he upgraded in 15 minutes. Considering what its taken to get to where we are then his system must have been perfectly configured to get it done that quickly. The actual install of the software on our “throttled-back” servers took exactly 20 minutes and that only takes me to 10.0.700. There is already a 700.1 patch on general release and I’d heard that 700.2 was due out yesterday. Unfortunately 700.2 hasn’t appeared on EpicWeb yet so I’m going to patch to 700.1 and revisit it later.

I’ve unchecked the “Launch the Epicor Administration Console” box at the end of my install as I’m applying the 700.1 patch before I go any further in configuring the software.

Our bandwidth allowed us to download the 800mb+ file in around 8 minutes then a further 3 or 4 to copy it to the server. The patch install took around 10 minutes to complete and this time I’ve left the “Launch the Epicor Administration Console” checkbox checked. After a minute or two pause the console opens.

A right-click on Database Server Management and Add Epicor Database Server allows me to add the server that my SQL instance for Epicor is installed on. I’ve verified the connection, clicked OK and the servername appears in the tree view pane.

I’ve finally hit my first problem and it’s not an Epicor one. As I’m keeping E9 and E10 running on the same box I don’t have enough space to migrate my E9 db into the E10 one. Time to talk to the IT Guys…

Not bad, 35 minutes and I have an extra 40gb to play with. Who said the wheels of industry turn slowly?

I’m adding my new database as Epicor10 (for the Live database) as the current Epicor 9 naming convention is Epicor905, EpicorPilot905, etc., and we are sticking with that format. After entering the Deployment Server path and clicking OK a WIP box appears stating “Adding a new database takes time. Please be patient.” The Create Database on Server dialog displays. Clicking the Start button kicks off the procedure which took around 17 minutes. Don’t forget that you’ll need to change the Configuration before you click start if you want the database and log files in a non-standard location and I’d advise making the initial database size somewhere near the current Epicor 9 database size. This means the database doesn’t have to grow while you are migrating it which can slow the process considerably. Creating the default 1gb E10 database took 9 minutes, creating a 20gb one took 17 so its worth creating an equivalent sized one up front as it doesn’t add much time.

Migrating the Current Database…

At this point I’d usually be taking a backup of my newly-created empty E10 database so I can restore it if the migration fails. As I’ve set my db size to 20gb I don’t have the capacity to so I’ll skip that part knowing I can drop and recreate my empty database if I want to.

I’ve right-clicked on my new db in the Epicor Administration Console and selected Migrate Epicor Database, then set the source to my E9 db and verified the other settings from the other tabs, than finally hit the Start button. Time to sit back and relax…