Big migration to BI 4.1/Crystal Server 2013 – watch your temp space.

It’s strange how unexpected problems can appear, even with a familar product.

I do about one upgrade per month from a really old version of Crystal Enterprise or BO Enterprise, so I’ve now got it down to a smooth process. This week, it was an upgrade from Business Objects Enteprise XI (Release 1) to Crystal Server 2013 that caught me out.

There’s no direct upgrade path from XI due to the lack of BIAR export. Simple solution to use a staging server with Crystal Server 2008. Then run a 2nd migration to Crystal Server 2013. This is much safer than the alternative of upgrading the XI R1 server to XI R2 as there is no change made to the source server (I like safe).

The customer’s servers had all been created with small C drives, so the File Repository Servers were just moved to a 2nd drive. With almost 40,000 instances to be migrated, plenty of space was needed.

Migration to Crystal Server 2008 went without a hitch.

Then, using the Upgrade Management Tool, I ran the migration to Crystal Server 2013. That came to a grinding halt when the C drive filled up. Initially, I thought I’d made a mistake changing the Repository Servers, so restarted the servers and ran the migration again.

Same result.

The Upgrade Management Tool uses a different approach to the old Import Wizard. It first creates a BIAR file that contains everything from the source server. This is then used as the source for the final import. Problem is, that file is created in the current user’s temp folder, which defaults to the C drive. It’s a very large file!

Solution: change the temp folder, log off and back on again, run the migration. Job done.

One to remember: when migrating, you need slightly more than twice the space used on the old server’s File Repository Servers.