Our IT/Networking team tells me to prepare for moving PDM Pro 2016 SP4 to a Windows Server 2012 box. And they are recommending I involve our VAR to assist in that transition. Has anyone moved to a new (VM) server? Does it really require the reseller? It seems as though each time I go to our VAR for support, they stick their open palm out. And we are on maintenance. I'm thinking of involving Solidworks Corp. since we have a corporate account with Solidworks. Our IT also mentioned it may be a good idea to upgrade to 2017 Products too. I think my head's going to explode. Is that a good/bad idea - simultaneously moving to a new server AND upgrading products? Wow...Any thoughts/suggestions from experience are appreciated.
We did something similar when we made the transition from 2015 to 2016.
Our old production system was 2008 R2 on both the Windows Server and SQL Server. We wanted to go to Server 2012 R2 and SQL Server 2014. Both our IT department and our VAR recommended fresh new servers as the targets, rather than upgrading the existing servers. While talking to our VAR they offered, for a nominal fee, to actually conduct a remote session and do the "upgrade" for us. Our VAR, 3DVision, is awesome, and the price they gave us really amounted to cheap insurance.
The process ended up being similar to cloning a vault to a different set of servers running the same PDM version and same OS/SQL Server version. There were some add'l files we backed up, and had to move our PDM SNL to the new Archive Server (as it was on the soon-to-be old Archive Server originally). Instead of installing 2015 on the new servers and upgrading that to 2016, we went straight to an "empty" install of 2016, then went through the process of restoring the db and vault, and running upgrade tools on the vault db. There were some add'l steps in tweaking the database.
While it would not be proper for me to share how much our VAR charged, I can say that this was all done in less than a day...not much more time than it usually takes us to execute a major version upgrade on an existing set of servers.
Michael