best practice for upgrading SQL 2005 Express to Standard Edition

[GreyhoundHH]

Hi,

I'm planning to upgrade an installation of VirtualCenter 2.5 running on the default SQL2005 Express Edition to SQL2005 Standard Edition. Is there a best practise for this kind of change? I couldn't find any tips for that... I've found general procedures for this kind of upgrade but nothing virtualcenter-specific.

I've learned that there are basically two ways of this upgrade: inplace and side by side. Inplace will just upgrade the SQL installation and keep the instance name. That seems to be pretty simple. But I'd like to get rid of the SQLEXP-instance name to avoid confusion in the future. This could be done by the side by side upgrade with de- and attaching the VC-databases. But how do I tell the VC to use a new instance-name after that? Will there be any hidden problems when changing the instance-name?

Any help or experiences appreciated

thx

[Cameron2007]

With any VMware upgrades ESX etc I have always gone for clean installs and this seems to be the preferred method in general. However as this is more a MS upgrade these posts might help

[kjb007]

As long as the data is in tact, you will be fine. To tell VC to use a new instance name, you update the DSN that vc is using. Update the data source with the new host/instance name. After that, vc may or may not start successfully, unless the passwords are sync'd, which they may or may not be. Sometimes, that gets lost. If that does happen, log into the vc machine. Open a dos prompt. CD into the virtual center install directlry. Run vpxd -p. This will allow you to change the password the vc server is using. Then, you should be able to start the service with the new db.

-KjB

[GreyhoundHH]

Thanks for your answers!

I had already discovered two of thos posted links and they gave a good idea of how to perform the upgrade in general.

OK, I ihink I'll do the upgrade in my testing environment and see if it runs smoothly if I change the instance name for the VC.

cya