Experienced Upgraders - Content Freezing prior to Upgrade - Sitefinity - On Premise – Configurations & Setup

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Posted by Community Admin on 27-Mar-2014 00:00

I am looking for your advice/experience when upgrading Sitefinity from an older version.

I have put together a deployment plan for upgrading our Sitefinity 5.1 site to 6.3. This includes copying the database into a staging environment, and running the incremental upgrades from version 5.1 through 6.3 against the database in staging. This database, and the upgraded publish of source files will be deployed to production. I have indicated the time to accomplish this will be somewhere between 6 and 8, not including user testing.

The current size of the content database is 6.2 Gb.

I am requesting a content freeze beginning 8am on day one, to last through 12pm on day 2. Day one will comprise the iterative upgrade of the source and database. Day two will be for user testing and production deployment.

Does this period of time for freezing content on a Sitefinity site sound reasonable for upgrading the site?

Posted by Community Admin on 31-Mar-2014 00:00

Hello Adam,

It sounds reasonable time span as you need to perform the following steps - 5.1 » 5.2 » 5.4 » 6.1 » 6.3. (if you have eCommerce you will have additional step 5.4 » 6.0)

A single upgrade step could be passed faster (15 - 20min), but please keep in mind, that you must have a backup, and after performing each step, browse your error&upgrade logs to ensure all scripts have executed successfully. So in best scenario you can upgrade for 1 - 2h.

Regarding the testing part - other users can share their experience.

Last, make also sure you strictly follow the upgrade documentation:
http://www.sitefinity.com/documentation/documentationarticles/upgrading-you-sitefinity-5.1-project-to-the-latest-version

Regards,
Vassil Vassilev
Telerik

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Posted by Community Admin on 02-Apr-2014 00:00

Thank you so much Vassil for your response.

We have closely followed the upgrade documentation, and were able to do so successfully in our development and test environments, including upgrading a number of custom code projects utilizing Sitefinity API. These custom projects increased the complexity, as some portions of the API between 5.1 and 6.3 had changed, requiring some refactoring of custom code on our part

I interpret this to mean my estimates are in line with your experience, given the fact that we have to download over 7 Gb of database and site files, perform the upgrade, deploy the upgraded database files and site to staging, verify the deployment is successful in staging, and redeploying the upgraded packages to production.

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