CRM 2011 upgrade issues and solutions

The following were some issues that we encountered when upgrading a CRM 4.0 installation to CRM 4.0 and I hope it helps others out there:

Issue 1: Connection string doesn’t like FQDN

Error| System.Exception: Action Microsoft.Crm.Setup.Server.AddServerAction failed. ---> Microsoft.Crm.CrmException: Exceeded column length: Column Name
   at Microsoft.Crm.SharedDatabase.DatabaseService.RestrictLength(Column column, PropertyEntry propertyEntry)
   at Microsoft.Crm.SharedDatabase.DatabaseService.BuildBaseInsertSql(PropertyBag columnSet)
   at Microsoft.Crm.SharedDatabase.DatabaseService.Create(String tableName, PropertyBag columnSet)
   at Microsoft.Crm.Admin.AdminService.CrmServerService.Create(String serverName, Guid scaleGroupId, Guid podId, ServerRoles roles, ServerState state)
   at Microsoft.Crm.Setup.Server.Utility.ConfigUtility.AddServerToConfigDB(String serverName, ServerRoles roles, ServerRoles roleExclusionMask)
   at Microsoft.Crm.Setup.Server.AddServerAction.Do(IDictionary parameters)
   at Microsoft.Crm.Setup.Common.CrmAction.ExecuteAction(CrmAction action, IDictionary parameters, Boolean undo)
   --- End of inner exception stack trace ---, Error, RetryCancel, Option1

This turned out to be caused by the fact that we were using the fully qualified domain name in CRM 4.0. Once we went into the Deployment Mananger and edited the organization to use just the simple name for the sql connection (i.e, without the xxxxx.domain.com), We were able to restart the CRM 2011 installer. Important: at this point we had to restore a snapshot of CRM 4.0, as CRM 2011 installer had removed the old installer.

Issue 2: Corrupted performance logs:

"Action Microsoft.crm.setup.common.registerasyncserviceAction failed"

Please see: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949092 – Although this is for CRM 4.0, the article is applicable to CRM 2011. In our case, it turned out to be corrupted performance logs. The performance logs were rebuilt using the command “lodctr /R” from c:\windows\system32.