Hi
As you all know, the GA edition of V12 was available since the 14th of February.
As a service provider it was already possible to install the RTM edition of V12 2 weeks before on the 30th of January.
That is a normal behaviour because all Veeam customers using a service provider should wait upgrading until the service provider has upgraded their infrastructure to the new major version.
Why? The upgrade is breaking, it will not work until the service provider has performed the upgrade!
Therefore the service provider should always be the first and afterwards it’s time for upgrading the Veeam environment of the customers.
As being a service provider for VCC BaaS I decided to not install the RTM edition, but wait until the GA edition was available.
Why? Otherwise I had to install afterwards the day 0 update to go from RTM to GA edition (KB4415: Release Information for Veeam Backup & Replication 12 Day 0 Update)
That’s in fact no problem at all, but when having a Veeam Cloud Connect infrastructure that is 24/7 actively being used, I need to setup 2 times a maintenance window in a short amount of time. I like to avoid that if possible.
Therefore I upgraded my Veeam Cloud Connect infrastructure at the 15th of February.
In this post I want to take you with me in the different steps I take to perform this.
- Upgrade the Veeam environment at the customers using Veeam Cloud Connect that are still running versions that will not be compatible anymore with the new version at the VCC (you can easily check this in the VSPC console)
Veeam Product Versions - Veeam Cloud Connect Guide
- Inform my colleagues that no one may upgrade the Veeam environment at the customers until I give a GO
(one of those moments I am in control 
) - Inform the customers that there will be a maintenance window during the day when the upgrade is being performed on the VCC enviroment
I prefer to perform that in the afternoon because at that time the VCC environment is the least active, so the customers and their jobs are the least being impacted
- Put the VCC in maintenance : new tasks will not being accepted anymore
- Put the VSPC in maintenance
- Check on every server of the VCC environment that there is enough free space on the virtual disks
- Download the Veeam Data Platform package (Veeam ONE and Veeam Backup & Replication)
Downloading the license is in fact not necessary because the existing license of version 11A is compatible with version 12
- Download the latest version of Veeam Service Provider Console if you are using this product (you should be using this as a service provider : it’s free !!!)
- Create a quick backup or snapshot of the Veeam ONE server
- Reboot the Veeam ONE server
- Perform the Veeam ONE upgrade on the Veeam ONE server
- Reboot the Veeam ONE server again
- Check if everything is working as it should be on the Veeam ONE server
- Create a Configuration Backup of the VCC server
- Create a SQL backup of the VSPC database
- Create a quick backup or snapshot of the VSPC database server and VSPC GUI server
- Reboot the VSPC database server and VSPC GUI server
- Install the latest CU of the SQL Server version you are running on the VSPC database server
- Perform the VSPC upgrade first on the VSPC database server
- Perform the VSPC upgrade afterwards on the VSPC GUI server
- Reboot the VSPC database server and VSPC GUI server
- Check if everything is working as it should on the VSPC portal
- Turn off the maintenance on the VSPC portal
- Check if the management agents are being upgraded at the tenants automatically
- Check if the connection to the VCC server is still OK
- Reboot the VCC server
- Create a SQL backup of the VCC database
- Create a quick backup or snapshot of the VCC server and other component servers (cloud gateways, WAN Accelerators, proxy-servers, ...)
- Install the latest CU of the SQL Server version you are running on the VCC database server
- Perform the VCC upgrade on the VCC server
- Reboot the VCC server again
- Open the VCC console and upgrade all components
- Reboot all component servers
- Check if everything is working as it should be
- Delete all created snapshots on the virtual machines if created
- Turn off the maintenance on the VCC server
- Check if new connections are created and new tasks/jobs are running
- Inform the colleagues that the upgrade is performed and give a GO that they may upgrade the Veeam infrastructure at the customers
- Inform the customers that VCC is running on the latest version and the maintenance window is finished
- Doublecheck if everything is working as it should be at the VCC and VSPC the day after
More information you can find at the helpcenter : About Veeam Cloud Connect - Veeam Cloud Connect Guide
I hope you can learn something from it.
Let me know if there are other steps you would take.
