How to increase the evolution period of a Site collection Eval site in SharePoint 2013

This is a quick blog article so it will be short and to the point.

SharePoint 2013 allows you to run SharePoint Site Collections in 2010 mode. It also gives you the opportunity to create a temporary upgraded Site Collection (in 2013 mode) to see how the site will preform. We call that evolution site collection. Here are good references about the topic:

• Upgrade a site collection to SharePoint 2013
• https://blog.fpweb.net/sharepoint-2013-evaluation-site-collections/#.VMFTepUtGCo

The evaluation site collection will expire by default after 31 days. The timer job "Delete Upgrade Evaluation Site" runs daily and deletes expired eval site collections.

To increase the evolution period of an existing eval site collection run the following PowerShell command:

 $site = Get-SPSite https://sp/sites/2010mode-eval 
$site.ExpirationDate = ($site.ExpirationDate).AddDays(90)

In the above code we have extended the eval site collection https://sp/sites/2010mode-eval another 3 months (90 days) 

 To confirm that the new value is applied, browse to the site collection and you should see the new expiry date at the top, or run the following PowerShell Script:

 $site = Get-SPSite https://sp/sites/2010mode-eval 
$site.ExpirationDate

If you want to change the expiry date value for the new evaluation site collection you may create in the future within a certain SharePoint Web Application you can run the following PowerShell Script:

 $webApp = Get-SPWebApplication https://sp 
$webApp.UpgradeEvalSitesRetentionDays 
 
$webApp.UpgradeEvalSitesRetentionDays = 300 
$webApp.Update()

Notice that we are targeting the web application https://sp and set the expiry value to 300 days.

Hope that helps.