We have a server running Windows 2008 R2 and SQL 2008 R2 currently. We will call it SQL01. This houses databases for about 8 different applications and also has the name hard coded into a lot, I repeat, a lot of various things.
We are at the point where one of our applications needs to be upgraded and it only works with SQL 2014. So we need to either do an in-place upgrade or fresh install.
The obvious choice to me as a system admin is to do a fresh install, but the development side of the department knows how many places the name "SQL01" is hard coded and they want to do an in-place upgrade to avoid all the issues that would show up if we changed names.
I have several questions, and I'd appreciate that the answers address them all if possible.
1. What are people's experiences with in-place upgrades from SQL 2008 R2 to SQL 2014?
2. To avoid this naming and coding issue, do companies use a permanent alias for their SQL servers? Like with exchange, we have an alias or A record pointing "mail" to the current Exchange server. As we do upgrades and the Exchange server names change, the "mail" entry will always be pointed to the current one. Do people do this for SQL as well to avoid our issue of hard coding names?
3. I've head that you can also have both SQL 2008 R2 and SQL 2014 on the same server running together. This really doesn't help though if the SQL 2014 instance would need to be something other than the default which everything is currently pointed to correct?
4. Is there any advice about a better way to go about this? Or a better way to do this moving forward? Other than not hard coding which I can't change now?
Thanks!