We upgraded Arena yesterday.  Our goal was to be done at a reasonable time, but things never go as planned.  Our plan was to do a complete re-install of the system to bring it up to Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Arena 2009.1.200 and VMWare ESXi 4.0.  The idea behind VMWare is that now in the future we can snapshot before we do any major change so that if something goes wrong we just roll back the system and either give up or try again.

We spent about 3 hours getting Windows, SQL Server, etc. installed; taking snapshots along the way.  We saw that VMWare had a max virtual HDD size of 2TB, so we made a 2TB disk for Arena, might as well, right?  Wrong.  Found out when we went to install Arena (and I went to see how many snapshots we had taken) that none of the snapshots took.  Apparently VMWare needs to resize a disk image to add 4GB per 256GB when it first starts doing snapshots, which would have pushed the drive to over 2TB.  oops.

So at around 2pm we started again with a 1TB volume and made sure the snapshots took.  Windows Server 2008 went in fine (except for the fact we had to wait for it to download SP2).  SQL Server 2008 also installed fine.  Though both are far more complex than their predecessors to get through the installers.  We installed all the “extra” software again with no problems. Arena also went just fine.  We installed 2009.1.100.  Imported our data. Re-ran 2009.1.100 (we had been running the beta before).  Did a quick test and then patched to 2009.1.200.

From there it was another few hours of fixing virtual host names, redirects, SSL certs, etc.  We finally finished and went home. We have a few things left to test, but we are up and running.  We still need to add all the kiosk printers (ugh) and then test them all, but we don’t expect any trouble from that.