Cunninghams OS Upgrade

[lornebooker]

Hi all,

 

Our Cunninghams is currently running on 2012 R2 (this should've been upgraded by our previous MSP in a previous project but that's a different story).

 

Do any of you have any experiences performing an in-place upgrade on your cashless catering servers? Good or bad feedback welcomed.

 

Cunninghams want £1300 to do this work after we've already paid them £1k to migrate our connection to Arbor, which only resulted in a few hours work, hence why I'm reluctant to go down this route straight away.

 

Thanks!

[chris11256]

I've done an in-place upgrade running their newer ImpactFusion system, took a snapshot of the VM beforehand just in case but in the end everything worked perfectly. Although this was going from Server 2019 to 2022.

 

If you pick a quiet time and take a snapshot beforehand, if it does mess up you can just revert to the snapshot.

Edited March 20, 2025 by chris11256

[dnlees]

Can you not make a copy of the VM, and run the in-place upgrade on that, to see if all goes well....???

 

[lornebooker]

Thanks both, we have a pretty solid backup system so will give it a go cloning the VM and upgrading.

 

Fingers crossed!

[DrCheese]

I've never bothered asking Cunninghams for this, I've just upgraded the server OS over the years by doing the snapshot/upgrade method above - Works well. Just test everything after and you're good to go.

 

[synaesthesia]

Have done inplaces on this a couple of times and never had an issue - as you mention, backups in place so you should be all good. Cunningham's support costs are extortion at best!

[kennysarmy]

Slightly related, we have been told by CRB that our outage yesterday morning was due to our SQL Express on the server running out of space and that we should upgrade to full SQL!

 

I'm getting a quote for that but the supplier has asked how many CAL's we would need? Any know if this is the number of tills? Or number of users who logon to the back-end of cashless catering or number of staff and students?

 

Also, is it not just possible to prune some of the data so that we don't need the full version of SQL?

What version are others running who have their system?

We are c. 1600 user accounts.

 

Cheers

 

[ThomL]

SQL can be license in different ways - one way doesn't need the use of CALs but might be fairly more expensive that the CAL version? I'd expect to pay between £200 and £400 per year for the version that doesn't require access CALs.

[synaesthesia]

Probably a better use of time & money to move to their cloud offering rather than yet another SQL server causing issues!

[k-strider]

as others have said backup the vm/snapshot then the inplace upgrade has always been fine i think ours has always been a VM and started at 2016 went to 19 then 22 all fine... because your on 2012 maybe just check the SQL version and the supported OS's im sure its probably fine...