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Seeking the best strategy for upgrading from the legacy version to the latest version

  • May 19, 2025
  • 5 replies
  • 148 views
R
Captain II
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Hello,
       We have been Acumatica PCS users for 8 years. Our business runs almost 24/7 (7×24 hours). To ensure stability and reliability, we chose to stay on the 2021 R2 version.However, Acumatica now requires us to upgrade from the end-of-life version. Otherwise, we will be charged a Retired Version Premium.
    We are currently deployed on Windows Server 2016 + SQL Server 2016. Unfortunately, 2024 R2 does not support two third-party applications.We must upgrade to Windows Server 2019/2022 + SQL Server 2019/2022.
Can someone advise the best strategy for this full upgrade? Here’s our proposed plan:

  1. Provision a new server with Windows Server 2019 + SQL Server 2019.
  2. Back up the database from the old server and restore it to the new server’s database.
  3. Use the ERP Upgrade Wizard to perform a phased upgrade: 2021 R2 → 2023 R1 → 2024 R2. Then thoroughly test all functionalities and customizations. This process may take at least one week.
  4. If testing is successful, repeat Steps 2–3 (e.g., using a production database backup), then switch business operations from the old server to the new server.

Also,to save costs, can we use MySQL instead of SQL Server? And if using Mysql, is the second step, data migration, easy to implement?

Best answer by ray20

For those who are interested,
Below are some of my experience and main take-aways from upgrades. They may not be completely accurate, but are provided for your reference.

Tip 1: Make full use of modern powerful cloud computing technology or virtual machine technology to create more images and backups. It is recommended to conduct thorough testing in a test environment before proceeding with the official upgrade.

Tip 2: There are limitations when upgrading Acumatica major versions. For example, 2021R2 can only be directly upgraded to 2023R1, mainly due to restrictions on database script upgrades. Therefore, during deployment, you can use the 2023R1 wizard to upgrade only the 2021R2 database to 2023R1, and then continue using the 2024R2 wizard to upgrade the database to 2024R2. In other words, it is not necessary to upgrade the application in between—only the database needs to be upgraded.

Tip 3: I tested database upgrades on both a high-performance computer (12 cores, 48GB, SSD) and a regular computer (4 cores, 16GB, SSD), and the time taken was almost the same. Additionally, CPU and memory usage remained low during the upgrade. It is likely that Acumatica uses a single-threaded operation for stability. While this is very reliable, it results in longer database upgrade times. Upgrading a 40GB database took approximately 1 hour. If your business cannot afford such a long downtime (fortunately, ours could), you need to plan ahead.

Tip 4: If data migration and upgrades are involved, ensure that there is sufficient disk space reserved—at least three times the size of the database file. This is because log files become very large during migration and upgrades. For a 40GB database, the log file can be as large as 50GB. Finally, you can use the built-in shrink function in the wizard to compress the files.

N

5 replies

R
Captain II
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  • ray20
  • Author
  • Captain II
  • May 19, 2025

      Can anyone give me some advice? Because this upgrade is really a tough task, and I want to plan well before taking action.

Neil Cantral
Jr Varsity I
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  • Neil Cantral
  • Jr Varsity I
  • May 20, 2025

Your strategy looks solid to me. By restoring the database to a separate instance you can safely test the upgrade with no risk to production and fall back to your legacy production server if you run into issues. VM snapshots of the app server are also helpful in case you need to rollback.

Make sure you keep track of how long each upgrade takes and how much disk space is used prior to it completing. Tranlogs can eat up a bunch of space while the upgrade is processing (you can always temporarily change the database recovery method if needed). Your timing to complete the upgrade is highly varied since it depends the particular version upgrade path and then your unique hardware and data. Only direct testing will indicate how much downtime to plan for.

R
Chris Hackett
R
Captain II
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  • ray20
  • Author
  • Captain II
  • May 20, 2025

​@Neil Cantral  Thank you so much. Your suggestions are very insightful to me. By the way, do you have any experience with upgrading across several versions? Especially when upgrading to 2024 R2 eventually, is there anything specific that needs attention?

Chris Hackett
Neil Cantral
Jr Varsity I
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  • Neil Cantral
  • Jr Varsity I
  • May 20, 2025

We’re not on 2024R2 yet, that testing is starting very soon. Biggest advice is to really test your core workflows and customizations. We’ve run into features suddenly working as advertised, that were turned on but never functioned as expected. Or customizations looking like they processed, but didn’t actually do anything - a green check doesn’t necessarily mean your data updated, just that no error was reported.

I’m typically getting chased by the end of support of my particular version, so I was typically jumping 2-3 versions. Customizations and third-party integrations were always a sticking point. That was too much risk for me on top of missing out on new features and big fixes - so I’m now requiring a yearly upgrade and aligning projects to support that. I’m actively trying to reduce our reliance on customization or partnering with ISVs that are always current.

Upgrades can be painful, but I don’t see the pace of the new features and improvements slowing down. Might as well design things to be more adaptable.

 

Irina
Chris Hackett
R
Captain II
Forum|alt.badge.img+6
  • ray20
  • Author
  • Captain II
  • Answer
  • May 28, 2025

For those who are interested,
Below are some of my experience and main take-aways from upgrades. They may not be completely accurate, but are provided for your reference.

Tip 1: Make full use of modern powerful cloud computing technology or virtual machine technology to create more images and backups. It is recommended to conduct thorough testing in a test environment before proceeding with the official upgrade.

Tip 2: There are limitations when upgrading Acumatica major versions. For example, 2021R2 can only be directly upgraded to 2023R1, mainly due to restrictions on database script upgrades. Therefore, during deployment, you can use the 2023R1 wizard to upgrade only the 2021R2 database to 2023R1, and then continue using the 2024R2 wizard to upgrade the database to 2024R2. In other words, it is not necessary to upgrade the application in between—only the database needs to be upgraded.

Tip 3: I tested database upgrades on both a high-performance computer (12 cores, 48GB, SSD) and a regular computer (4 cores, 16GB, SSD), and the time taken was almost the same. Additionally, CPU and memory usage remained low during the upgrade. It is likely that Acumatica uses a single-threaded operation for stability. While this is very reliable, it results in longer database upgrade times. Upgrading a 40GB database took approximately 1 hour. If your business cannot afford such a long downtime (fortunately, ours could), you need to plan ahead.

Tip 4: If data migration and upgrades are involved, ensure that there is sufficient disk space reserved—at least three times the size of the database file. This is because log files become very large during migration and upgrades. For a 40GB database, the log file can be as large as 50GB. Finally, you can use the built-in shrink function in the wizard to compress the files.

Chris Hackett
N
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