Vault 2016 upgrade

[wesbird]

Hi, 

  We are on Vault Pro/Office 2014. now it's time to plan upgrad

1. We are thinking upgrade to 2016, should we upgrade to 2017?

2. We use AutoCAD and Autodesk Architure most the time, we are thinking upgrade AutoCAD first, then Vault. in this case, does Vault 2014 AutoCAD AddIn work with AutoCAD 2016? or we have to upgrade them all in once

3. We have multiple vault for each of our client. is it possible we can upgrade by phase, e.g. Client A this weekend, Client B next weekend, ...

Thank you so much

Wes

[swalton]

We are about to do something similar.  Vault Pro and Inventor 2014 to 2017.

We chose to go to 2017 so we could wait a bit longer before the next upgrade.  We try to keep no more than 2 releases behind the latest.  In the past, we have waited for the release of the first service packs for both the CAD application and Vault.

Vault can usually work with 2 prior releases of the CAD applications, but not newer ones.  So you can install Vault 2016 to work with Inventor 2016 to 2014, but not Inventor 2017.  Check the Vault 2016 and 2017 help files to confirm CAD compatibility for each release.

Autodesk recommends/requires upgrading Vault in two-release steps.  So you can upgrade from Vault 2014 to 2015 or 2016 in one step.  If you want to go to Vault 2017 from Vault 2014, you will have to do a migration step to 2015 or 2016 first.  This will not affect the CAD files at all.  It is only an update of the Vault software and the database details. 

The Vault migration affects the entire ADMS server software so you will not be able to migrate one vault at a time.  Its all or nothing. 

Plan on building a test server to practice your migration before you move your production data.  Use a recent backup of your production data to build the test server.  This will give you an idea of the time your production users will be locked out of Vault.  Vault can run on virtualizated servers which can help with the test environment.

Once the Vault is migrated, you can start to migrate the CAD files to the proper release.  We tend to do that as we actually open the CAD files, but you can do it with Task Scheduler.  This is something you can do in stages, as long as the old version of the CAD software can talk to the new Vault software.