Upgrading SCOM 2012 SP1 To SCOM 2012 R2? ABSOLUTELY NOT a No-Brainer!!

Issue
Phew! Have been here once and don’t want to be there anymore. Running an upgrade of working and fully functional SCOM 2012 SP1 environment to SCOM 2012 R2. It should be a straight forward process, wouldn’t it? I mean, this upgrade is fully supported by Microsoft AND all the requirements are met.

HOWEVER, the upgrade failed TOTALLY! The first MS server to be upgraded ended up as just a server with NO SCOM functionality at all. And the SCOM databases? Was hard to tell on what level they were . The upgrade just did a rollback AFTER the SCOM MS 2012 SP1 server was removed, resulting in a total removal of the SCOM MS server functionality from that server and breaking the SCOM MG functionality in total!

A blog posting? Not quite…
Luckily I could fix it all. However it took a lot of time and had to find out a lot of things the hard way. Since it took me a lot of time, I had no time to document everything properly. So when all was just fine again (SCOM 2012 R2 was in place and running like clock work) I hadn’t enough materials to share on my blog. So I decided not to put on my blog since I couldn’t present it like I normally do: Issue > Cause(s) > Solution.

Along came a respected friend
’Luckily’ a good friend of mine experienced the same issue. He fixed as well AND found time to document it properly AND has posted it on his blog, to be found here. This is the first posting, second will follow soon. Thank you Bob for sharing! Awesome!

Advice
When you’re about to upgrade your SCOM 2012 SP1 environment and even when all the requirements are in place, don’t expect it to be ‘a walk in the park’. Things break easily resulting in a wrecked SCOM 2012x environment.

So prepare for the worst and READ Bob’s posting so you’re ahead of potential disaster. And when it strikes you know what to do.

And: Backups WITH working Restore options (!!!!) are you’re best FRIEND when upgrading ANYTHING!!!