How To Prepare For SharePoint Server 2016 Upgrade From 2010

Introduction

Usually, the upgrade process is a bit tricky as we move to next version of SharePoint. As we all know, Microsoft provides support only for upgrades from immediate previous versions. But still, we have some shortcuts (like using migration tools) to skip the intermediate versions and jump to the latest version of SharePoint. Also, no in-place upgrades are available for 2013 and 2016 versions. So, we have to build a new server in parallel and migrate the data from older ones.

In this article, I give a little information for getting yourselves prepared for the SharePoint Server 2016 upgrade from SharePoint 2010.

Things to do before preparing for Upgrade

Here is the list of things to be done before upgrade -

1. Analyze the current system (Applications) in SharePoint 2010.
2. Identify the list of things to be migrated to the proposed 2016 version.
3. Plan for the Clean-up process. It helps to get rid of the unwanted things to be moved to proposed system.
4. Plan for sending communications to the business users.
5. Plan for the downtime and schedule to move contents.
6. Time to think about utilizing cloud features, since SharePoint 2016 has capability to integrate SharePoint on-premises with online (cloud) and make them work seamlessly (hybrid method).
7. Server allocation for Staging environment with SharePoint 2013. May be you can use Standalone or two servers, one for Database and the other for SharePoint 2013 installation. Refer this link for 2013 Hardware & Software requirements.
8. New set of servers for SharePoint 2016 environment. Here is the Hardware and Software requirements for 2016.
   
9. Prepare backup plan and for Failover Environments (Disaster Recovery).
   
10. Prepare checklist for the pre and post migrations.
    
11. Testing the plans for post-migration.

SharePoint 2016 upgrade process flow

Here is the simple process flow for SharePoint 2016 upgrade. It shows where to start, what to do, and how to reach the target.



How to move the data to SharePoint 2016?

Now, we need to do two primary things -

1. Installation and configuration of SharePoint Server 2013 (standalone). Refer this link.
2. Installation and configuration of SharePoint Server 2016 (Production Environment). Refer this link.

These server installations are done in parallel since there is no in-place upgrade available for 2013 & 2016 versions.

The first and foremost thing is to make the SharePoint 2010 sites read-only and to take the full backup of the content databases. After that, you need to restore those content databases to SharePoint 2013 staging. As a result, the schema will be changed once the restored content databases are mounted in 2013 environment. Now, content databases are ready for migration to SharePoint 2016 environment.

This link might be helpful to proceed with the data porting to Staging and from there to Production environment.
Once the data has been ported successfully to 2013, next thing is to follow the same process to move the content to SharePoint 2016 environment.

Finally, perform the post migration checks.

The following links will be useful for troubleshooting,

• SharePoint 2013
• SharePoint 2016