I just read a blog post by Chandima Kulathilake (MVP) this evening that I wanted to throw a few thoughts out about. The post (read the whole thing, its worth it) was initially about the pending availability of SP2 for the 2007 platform – but what really caught my eye was a description of an update method that I hadn’t considered before.
In many cases, when patching SharePoint environments we tend to simply schedule downtime and run the patches on the whole system in one fell swoop. As many of us are aware and Chandima reminds us, this can sometimes take a number of hours to complete depending on the size of the system.
The particular scenario that Chandima identifies is one where you may have one or more sites that have high-availability requirements where downtime must be kept to a minimum. In this case, you can by following his steps, upgrade one content database at a time. This allows you to bring the site or sites in that content database BACK ONLINE and then proceed with upgrading each of the other content databases while the one that has completed is available. Bear in mind, the performance of the sites that are up are likely to take a hit due to both the full crawl that will start and the upgrading of the rest of the content databases as they are reattached to the farm. But even if the performance isn’t up to its normal level, the sites are available.
With this upgrade approach in mind, you may also want to think about your content database strategy (yes, I ramble about this topic regularly). The upgrade and high-availability advantages puts yet another slant on how you plan content databases, sites and webs. For example, if you have a site that you know is going to be high-availability, based on the information above, you may want to isolate it in its own content database even thought the site may not otherwise justify that strategy. Remember, you also have tools available that can help move sites or webs around between content databases, allowing you to isolate sites during or after their creation if necessary.
I’m really not saying much more than what Chandima mentions in his post, but I was pretty jazzed about it and wanted to elaborate even more on that point. 🙂 Well done Chandima.
Along related lines, another good reference link to keep handy is a page kept up by Penny Coventry (MVP). I’ve found myself pointing folks to this regularly when they ask how to tell what version they are on and what the latest versions are.
Have fun!