PC Upgrade Checklist

My team has recently been through a large PC Upgrade, where we moved our servers and updated to the latest version of HP PC. Below is a checklist that might help you avoid a few snags:

• Schedule the upgrade well in-advance and communicate the impact to all stakeholders.
  • Notify your team via Calendar Invite during the maintenance period
  • Prevent miscommunication by adding all hosts to a ‘Maintenance’ Timeslot within the Lab
  • Ask all team members to check-in items before the upgrade.
• Scale up any PC systems as needed. (CPU/RAM/Disk)
• Examine OS choices and see if it’s a good time to move to a new version.
• Examine IE requirements and ensure compatibility if you plan on moving to a newer version of IE.
• Examine backup schedule for key-systems.
  • Does it make sense to increase or reduce backup frequency post migration?
• Examine service account usage.
  • Does it make sense to create new accounts along with the upgrade?
• Clean up ALM. (Old scripts, Test Run, Monitor Profiles, etc)
• Stage all the install files on the PC Hosts so the installs are efficient
  • Build consistency and use the same install method for all VMs
  • Build an install guide for the team to follow
    • Verify you have all the patches downloaded as well for all components
      • PC Server
      • PC Host
      • ALM
      • Network Virtualization
• Ensure the team has Admin rights to all impacted systems
  • Be sure to update/remove permissions once complete
• Ensure your main service account has Admin access to the SQL server, PC, and ALM servers
• Test! Yes, build a sample project and verify the new instance works as designed. Check monitoring, script creation, check-in process, general GUI functionality, test execution, etc.

On the day of conversion/upgrade:

• Ensure all the systems you plan on modifying are backed-up in-case of catastrophe
• Ensure you have all the support you may need to in terms of support.
  • Server, Network, SQL, etc.
• To avoid issues with the upgrade, Disable Versioning before you move Project DBs.
  • (Ensure all versions controlled items are checked in)
• Use RoboCopy to move the file repository
  • This will take hours unless your team is very small.
• Test all critical ALM projects!
• Verify connectivity to any cloud providers that existed prior to the upgrade.