Upgrade on Veritas Enterprise vault will very according to the setup.

If its on a single node the upgrade will be easier.
If it is on Veritas Cluster the before the upgrade few factors needs to be taken  care.
If it is on Windows cluster the before the upgrade few factors needs to be taken  care.

In this article we will have a look at performing Enterprise Vault Upgrade on Windows server failover Cluster.
Also if we are upgrading from 11.x.x lot of things needs to be taken care because:

12  = Major release
12.X = Minor release
12.x.y = Maintenance release

Readiness before upgrading to EV version 12.0 from 11:
1) EV 12.x and above requires Windows Server 2012, hence if you are running older OS  version on the current EV version, you will have to migrate to a new server
2) EV 12 version supports Outlook 2016 on the server with the below conditions
If its Outlook 2016 exchange connection must be MAPI/HTTP and not RPC/HTTP
4) It Supports only SQL2012 and above. If we have SQL 2008 then we need to migrate to atleast SQL 2012

Note:
Enterprise Vault does not provide the high availability upgrades meaning we cannot perform the upgrade when the system is active and accessible via the passive node.The upgrades must be completed on all the nodes in the cluster before we start the Enterprise vault services after the upgrade. The system will be down and not accessible during the upgrade. So better to plan and perform this upgrade on a weekend.

Below things needs to be done prior to the upgrade:

1. Stop all the task controller services. No Archive must be initiated or running. Stop all the jobs and make sure no jobs are running for any mailbox servers.
2. Backup your Enterprise vault Server , data and the SQL stores.
3. Clean the queues and the queues must be empty. There is a procedure to clean up the queues if the EV is running on Failover Cluster
4. Unload the Antivirus on the EV nodes.
5. Ensure no Backup , SQL, Nodes are happening during this time.
6. Supported Outlook client on the EV server –

The Following Versions of Outlook Running on the Server are not supported:
Outlook 2013 SP1 64 bit version
Outlook 2013 Original Release
Outlook 2016 (64-bit version)

Only the below Versions of Outlook on the EV server are supported:

Outlook 2013 SP1 (32 bit version)
Outlook 2016 (32 bit windows installer, available with volume license)

If we need to upgrade the outlook on the EV nodes perform the following:

Stop the EV admin cluster resource service from the failover cluster.
Install the supported version of Outlook.
Restart all the EV Services.

Upgrade EV on a Windows Server Failover Cluster on EV Nodes:

Before we run the upgrade we need to run the deployment scanner to check required software and settings.
Inorder to perform that
Load the Media – run setup.exe – click enterprise vault – click server preparation

Once the deployment scanner is completed, if  the prerequisites are successful we can see the results like below.

If they are not successful we might get like below and need to correct steps as  mentioned in the report.

Logon to the Active Node with the vault service account and bring the admin service resource offline. If there are multiple sites make sure they are also stopped.

Load the media and run the setup. Make sure no MMC are open in the server.

Click – server installation and select upgrade existing server.

Select only EV services,Admin console, search access components, operations manager and reporting only if we have exchange integrated with EV.

Click install.

Once the setup is complete on the active node we will get screen like below . Better to restart after the upgrade  completes on all other nodes, SQL and indexes.

Steps to upgrade the DB (Directory, Monitoring & Audit):

Logon to the active node with vault service account.
Open the Enterprise Vault Managment Shell.
Run the command Start-EvDatabaseUpgrade -Verbose.
Once the upgrade is complete we can see dbupgrade subfolder where we can see the logs of the db upgrade and mandatorily they must be verified.

Once the DB is upgraded and the upgrade is completed on all the nodes, we can go to the failover cluster and bring EV Admin Server Resource online.

Additional Requirements based on setup:

1. Upgrade the EV reporting component.
2. Upgrade the MOM & SCOM management pack and delete the previous management packs.
3. By Default EV deploys the Exchange server forms to users computer automatically.If the forms from organizational library is used then thhe Exchange server forms needs to be upgraded.

Thanks & Regards
Sathish Veerapandian