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Is there any statistics on how long it will take to in place upgrade SQL Server 2014 to SQL Server 2016 on a server with 1000+ databases and 10TB of storage? How long it will take to install subsequent 2016 service packs? Is there a way to optimize those installation times by configuration?

The goal is to minimize maintenance windows

Update: Let me clarify a question. All production updates will be tested in QA environment, the question is not about it all. I'm asking about known to you options to optimize upgrade duration. I'll search for those options myself by measuring upgrade time in my environment, but if there is a "previous art" - please share.

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    Have you performed any tests? There's no hard and fast answer to this as every machine, and configuration is different (even if someone had that many databases, and that much storage). Not to mention, an in place upgrade is going to hurt you a lot should there be that need for a rollback because of issues with some piece of code.
    – Nic
    Mar 21, 2017 at 15:00
  • Sorry if this is out of the scope of the discussion but it is relevant in an answer: what is your roll-back requirement? How do you plan on rolling back? A 'uninstall'?
    – Ali Razeghi - AWS
    Mar 22, 2017 at 17:49

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I'd really recommend not doing an in-place upgrade; certainly not for a very large system like yours. The reasons for this recommendation are many, and have been covered extensively by Mike Walsh in his answer on a separate question.

If you really need to do an in-place upgrade, the only real way to determine the amount of time required is to do a dry run on separate, identical, hardware. This would involve installing SQL Server, and using backup-and-restore to copy all 1,000+ databases to the test server, then performing an in-place upgrade. I'd recommend doing this in the very minimum since it allows you to test SQL Server in your environment prior to committing to it in production.

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