Preparing for Upgrade/Migrate from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013

Planning for the upgrade is the most important part of a successful migration. Below are some of the key points to consider before starting migrate / Upgrade from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013.

1. Prepare a governance plan with the business to understand the below implications

   a)Create a Notification Plan for Business community

1. Include information about timeline of the read-only environment and upgrade timeline.
2. What would happen if there happens to be a roll back and the expected downtime for the business community?
3. Provide directions to site collection admins about the self-service upgrade capabilities.
4. Adoption policy or Training plan for End users on the new environment and modified/customized SharePoint applications.
5. Client Software update plan if any.
6. Technical Information on what would work and what would not in the new environment.

                  i. Checkout Out state will be lost after the upgrade

                  ii.  Third Party solutions that does not have a upgraded version for the new 2013 environment or that changes the user interaction for end users in the system.

    b) Allow/Deny SharePoint 2010/SharePoint 2013 Mode Site Collections to be created and run in the new SharePoint 2013 environment

   c) Allow/Deny Self-Service Site Collection upgrade which can be performed by Site Collection Admins

1. Communication Plan and Training Plan for the site collection admins on performing the self-service site collection upgrade.
2. Prepare a list of site collections that has to be upgraded by farm admins and excluded them from allowing self-service upgrade.
3. Prepare Farm admin support plan for Site Collection Admins to log in issues when they migrate to the new 2013 environment.
4. Make sure you have installed vendor supplied third party components for both 2010 and 2013 versions in the environment.

  d) Update any new governance policies for the 2013 environment

1. Allow 14 Mode Site Collections to be created or not after the upgrade.
2. Allow 14/15 Mode Site Collections to work side by side.
3. Large Lists Throttling.
4. Define Application Management Policies that defines how the new SharePoint Apps should be governed in the 2013 environment(http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fp161237.aspx#AppPolicy)
5. Identify features that will not be supported based on the future roadmap of SharePoint product and validate with the business for allowing usage of the templates for end users.( http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff607742.aspx)

  e) Update your operations support model to reflect any changes to the end user support structure.

2. Do a Performance assessment in the old SharePoint 2010 Environment, to validate after the upgrade. This needs to either improve with the Hardware, Network or Software Configuration.

   a) Identify and define baseline performance requirements for SharePoint page response times on Peak and Average Traffic time, Upload/Download time, time required for Backup/Restore Site, time required for accessing the site via the different set of authentication providers, high critical apps response time e.t.c…

   b) Use Profilers to identify and measure current performance.

       i.      Client Profiler – Ex. Jquery Profilers,

       ii.      Network Profiler – Ex. Bandwidth and Latency test ,

       iii.      Server Profiler –Ex. SQL Server Profile, PerfMon.

       iv.      Hardware Profiling – Profiling Disk Drive IOPs.

   c) Plan to implement Tools like Compuware Vantage that simulates on-going network performance by the use of synthetic and real user monitoring which would help to

   d) Plan for using Request Manager for SharePoint 2013 to improve performance.

   e) Plan to implement Blob Cache and Object cache to improve performance on 2^nd and Subsequent page load time and download time.

   f) Plan to use Distributed caching service, a new feature in SharePoint 2013 which provided in-memory caching, to improve authentication time and page response time.

3. Update your capacity planning document as per your current sizing requirements (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff758647.aspx)

   a) Prepare a storage forecasting plan for the next 3 years based on the past storage metrics and percentage of user and content growth.

   b) Ensure you plan the capacity based on the roadmap your organization has on consolidating other applications into SharePoint.

   c) Measure Requests per second based on No. of concurrent users during peak and off hours and provide inputs to architecture team if required to redesign farm topology

4. Develop new Farm/Search/Network/Storage topologies based on your performance assessment results, Capacity planning documents and new features you plan to use in SharePoint 2013

5. Plan to upgrade the content in a phased manner which would ideally reduce the impact. Plan for less critical site collections first and move on to the high critical apps.

6. Prepare a plan, if required, to reorganize content in the farm. This might be consolidating site collections of same nature, remove repetitive information, archive content that is less critical and unused.

This concludes the preparation you have to make before actually starting the migration. Plan well as it helps you to identify risks involved in the migration.