In place upgrade from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010 fails

Its been too long! I just realised I haven’t blogged for over 3 months – must try harder!

So today I was working on a client site on an in place upgrade from MOSS 2007 Standard to SharePoint 2010 Standard. Firstly I must say I’m not a fan of any in place upgrade whether this is SharePoint or another experience with Microsoft however due to time constraints and hardware availability this was the best way forward.

Background to the upgrade process

Following the TechNet article on in place upgrade to SharePoint 2010 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263212(v=office.14).aspx. MOSS 2007 was installed with service pack 2 (Build number 12.0.0.6421) and the pre-upgrade checker run reporting no errors (at this stage it is worth noting that the October 2009 CU updates the pre-upgrade checker however due to timescales this CU update was not installed).

SharePoint 2010 media was slipstreamed with August 2010 CU that would take the new SharePoint build to 14.0.5123.5000.

The Upgrade

The upgrade failed with 3 errors 2 of which were due to features and these were deactivated and solutions retracted for the purposes of removing errors in the short term however 1 error remained from running the command:

psconfig -cmd upgrade -inplace v2v –passphrase <passphrase> -wait

From the logs generated the errors in the log (the log file is typically named Upgrade-Date-Time-error.log) were as follows:

[PSCONFIG] [SPUpgradeSession] [INFO] [6/22/2011 1:45:30 PM]: No context object
[PSCONFIG] [SPUpgradeSession] [ERROR] [6/22/2011 1:45:30 PM]: This upgrade session has been stopped. Possible causes include the process being terminated abruptly or the OS has rebooted. Please restart the upgrade again.

As you can see from the error it wasn't very helpful as this did not apply as I tried to complete the upgrade several times. Further errors were also present when running the command from the prompt:

Failed to upgrade SharePoint Products.

An exception of type Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPUpdatedConcurrencyException was thrown. Additional exception information: An update conflict has occurred, and you must re-try this action. The object SPUpgradeSession Name=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx was updated by domain\user, in the PSCONFIG (10056) process, on machine SERVER. View the tracing log for more information about the conflict.

Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPUpdatedConcurrencyException: An update conflict has occurred, and you must re-try this action. The object SPUpgradeSession Name=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx was updated by domain\user, in the PSCONFIG (10056) process, on machine SERVER. View the tracing log for more information about the conflict.

From researching other blogs I found a Microsoft article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939308 suggesting that when upgrading you may need to clear the cache on the WFE servers. This also suggests it is for MOSS 2007 and not SharePoint 2010 and at this stage the server was upgraded with SharePoint 2010 binaries although this blog by Stefan Goßner that suggested it may be applicable to SharePoint 2010 http://blogs.technet.com/b/stefan_gossner/archive/2011/03/04/delayed-february-2011-cu-for-sharepoint-2010-is-now-available.aspx (see Stefan’s comments).

I tried this procedure several times with no luck!

I found a further article here http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepoint2010setup/thread/8406c0f6-5de9-4079-bf37-8640a60d1a19/ and detached all content databases from the farm and this did not work.

Basically time and time again receiving the breakdown at the bottom of each attempt:

Total number of configuration settings run: 3

Total number of successful configuration settings: 2

Total number of unsuccessful configuration settings: 1

Successfully stopped the configuration of SharePoint Products.

So at this point I was starting to run out of ideas and short of reinstalling which I really didn't want to do.

Solution

I finally managed to resolve my issue by taking a brave step of upgrading the farm (see my previous note that I was very short of ideas and time at this) to a later cumulative update (Should this have failed I had a complete backup prior to the upgrade to fall back on). Not being a fan of installing the latest CU just for the sake of it being the latest I chose February 2011 CU (Build number 14.0.5136.5002) and after implementing this CU I was successful in upgrading with a concluding statement along the lines of 4 out of 4 tasks completed successfully.

As always I hope this helps if you end up reading this, please do leave me a comment on your experiences.