Once you have finished the planning phase and all preparations it's time to perform the upgrade/migration of your SQL Server environment. For the scenario used in this chapter, we'll upgrade an existing SQL Server 2016 to SQL Server 2017. One thing you also need to carefully consider is the edition upgrade path, which you need to follow.
We will be upgrading Enterprise Edition and the Edition will stay the same after the upgrade. You can, however, upgrade between editions. You can find the whole edition and version upgrade matrix on Microsoft's website at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/database-engine/install-windows/supported-version-and-edition-upgrades where you can see what versions and editions can be upgraded.
In the next steps, we will consider the in-place upgrade of the SQL Server first. Once we have started the SQL Server...
