Zerowait has been using the Peachtree accounting package for many years. Over the past decade, we worked our way through the BTreive to Pervasive upgrade, and this year there was a major upgrade to SAGE 50, required by the new owners of Peachtree, Sage Software. Upgrading a company’s accounting package is something that has to be done carefully. Since we had deployed Peachtree on an ISCSI mounted LUN on our NetApp Filer and we were migrating the app server to a Virtual Machine environment, our upgrade had a few more intricacies than normal to resolve.
The discovery phase of this project looked back over time at the steady growth of our company, to understand how the network and data store had grown and changed over the last 12 years since we first put Peachtree data on our NetApp Filer. While reviewing our Peachtree usage history we found that the shared files and ISCSI LUN set-up were from a different era; now that we were in a VM environment things needed to be changed.
We decided the best way to move forward was to migrate our ISCSI LUN to a VDisk. Although we consider this to be a pretty standard architecture today, our engineering team found it difficult to get step by step instructions from Sage on how to migrate their application in our particular environment. So it was up to us to figure it out. Our team built a test VM environment using the old version of Peacthree, then performed the data migration using RoboCopy and everything seemed to work well. We had our primary users test the application to make certain everything was working correctly, after which our engineering team did an upgrade to SAGE 50 in the virtual environment. There were some tweaks required but we found that we had everything working in the test environment and were confident that we could do an upgrade to our live environment. We made several backups to be safe, and then our engineering team upgraded our Peachtree Accounting package to SAGE 50 and migrated our users to the new package, documenting the way that shared folders had to be mounted, accessing the Forms correctly, and updating DNS on some of the user desktop machines.
We successfully migrated our accounting package without any significant downtime and by using our VM architecture we were able to reduce network complexity and simplify our shared company folders, which after over a decade of accumulated use had gotten a bit convoluted. The whole process took about 25 hours of engineering time to accomplish and we are now on SAGE 50 with a more reliable network and storage architecture than we had before the upgrade.
While we consider Peachtree and SAGE 50 to be a pretty standard application to be hosted in a VM environment with NetApp storage we were surprised to find that the vendor did not have a lot of documentation on this type of network and storage environment. Therefore we had to create our own migration plan, which worked out quite well. I wonder how many other companies are using their Peachtree / SAGE 50 in a VM and NetApp environment?
