Obilogic Team Blog

Upgrade approaches in SharePont 2010 Foundation

For those who performed upgrades from WSS 2003 to WSS v3 and/or are expecting to upgrade from WSS v3 to SP Foundation 2010 at somepoint in the future, there appears to be some interesting new upgrade paths available (...as well as the familiar 'in place' option)
 

1. In-place upgrade
   With this approach, you can install SharePoint Foundation 2010 on the same hardware. You can also upgrade the content and settings in the server farm as part of a single process.
   
    
2. Database attach upgrade
   With this approach, you can upgrade the content for the environment on a separate farm. The result is that you do not upgrade any of the services or farm settings. You can upgrade the databases in any order and upgrade several databases at the same time.
   
   
   
3. Hybrid approach 1: Read-only databases
   With this approach, you can continue to provide read-only access to content during the upgrade process by setting the databases to read-only while the upgrade is in progress on another farm
   
   
   
4. Hybrid approach 2: Detach databases
   With this approach, you can take advantage of an in-place upgrade's ability to upgrade content and settings, while adding the speed of a database attach upgrade. For this approach, you use an in-place upgrade to upgrade the farm and settings, and to detach and upgrade multiple databases in parallel (on the same farm or a separate farm)
   
   
   
   

Full details on the upgrade process is available on TechNet:
Upgrade process overview (SharePoint Foundation 2010)
(...where it also details possible "Special cases")