Dynamics GP 2015R2 to 2018R2 upgrade - Installation

This is the second blog post related to our upgrade of Dynamics GP.

An upgrade would not happen without installing the new software.  We are following the traditional and recommended "best practice" path of provisioning a new server, and updating the underling OS and SQL software.  And, of course, this is an all Microsoft operation.

So once IT handed off the server I logged in and immediately installed my required components from ninite.com.  (If you haven't used this service why not?)  My typical load is:

7-Zip

Notepad+

PDF reader - our company standard is FoxIt, though I've used PDFCreator in the past.

Classic Shell

Apparently IT did not load Chrome so I'll be doing that also.

After that comes the SQL installation.  Just a basic Engine install, but we need the Agent also.  We do not update domain service accounts with each install so I stuck with that.  We do allocate a separate drive for backups so I configured for that, as well the other standard choices for GP (mixed mode, DOCI, etc.)

Then comes SQL Management Studio.  That is now published separate by Microsoft so I downloaded the latest version of that.

And on to the standard GP 2018R2 installer.  We follow the best practice of installing the base version first, updated to the latest SP, and including all required features.  And we do this without any 3rd parties or customizations.

Finally I copied over our GP company databases and restored and readied them for the upgrade.  The two important steps there are to set all databases to Simple Recovery, and bring all to SQL 2016 compatibility.

Next up is the upgrade itself.