Azure DevOps Server 2022 - OnPrem?
Yes I know - you can get everything from the cloud nowadays, but we are still using our OnPrem hardware and were running the “old” Azure DevOps Server 2020. The _Azure DevOps Server 2022 was released last december, so an update was due.
Requirements
If you are running am Azure DevOps Server 2020 the requirements for the new 2022 release are “more or less” the same except the following important parts:
- Supported server operation systems: Windows Server 2022 & Windows Server 2019 vs. the old Azure DevOps Server 2020 could run under a Windows Server 2016
- Supported SQL Server versions: Azure SQL Database, SQL Managed Instance, SQL Server 2019, SQL Server 2017 vs. the old Azure DevOps Server supported SQL Server 2016.
Make sure you have a backup
The last requirement was a suprise for me, because I thought the update should run smoothly, but the installer removed the previous version and I couldn’t update, because our SQL Server was still on SQL Server 2016. Fortunately we had a VM backup and could rollback to the previous version.
Step for Step
The update process itself was straightforward: Download the installer and run it.
The screenshots are from two different sessions. If you look carefully on the clock you might see that the date is different, that is because of the SQL Server 2016 problem.
As you can see - everything worked as expected, but after we updated the server the search, which is powered by ElasticSearch was not working. The “ElasticSearch”-Windows-Service just crashed on startup and I’m not a Java guy, so… we fixed it by removing the search feature and reinstall it. We tried to clean the cache, but it was still not working. After the reinstall of this feature the issue went away.
Features
Azure Server 2022 is just a minor update (at least from a typical user perspective). The biggest new feature might be “Delivery Plans”, which are nice, but for small teams not a huge benefit. Check out the release notes.
A nice - nerdy - enhancement, and not mentioned in the release notes: “mermaid.js” is now supported in the Azure DevOps Wiki, yay!
Hope this helps!
