Windows Server 2012 in-place upgrade to 2012 R2

Shad

Shad

Shad

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Has anyone done this? Any gotchas to be aware of?

I know a rebuild is always going to be better... I've got 8 servers I'd like to upgrade with minimal fuss. They're all VMs so I can snapshot and rollback quite easily if necessary.
 
Yeah two are DCs also doing DNS and DHCP. I'll leave them for now then or it'll be a pain changing network settings on everything.

I'll try the upgrade on a disconnected clone to start with then. Cheers guys :)
 
jake108 said:
Advise massive caution.

We have some Windows Server 2012 deployments which we tried to upgrade in place out of quickness. We never did a DC though, thought it was too risky.

Don't do a server which is acting as a certificate authority, RAS, acting as a secondary failover cluster (it breaks things!), a DFS branch server in a remote office (it disabled deduplication, remote differential compression and we couldn't re-enable it after upgrade), anything running System Center 2012 server side.

Recommend a full reinstall. Even following the official Microsoft guides were pretty useless, although it wasn't personally me who did the migrations. I did the migraines troubleshooting after the fact.
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Thanks Jake, exactly the sort of experience I was looking for. So forgetting my two DCs and the two servers running DFS (admittedly quite a simple setup of 1-to-1 replication so they might upgrade OK), that just leaves two web servers, a database server and a TFS server. I think I'll put this upgrade idea on ice and build fresh servers instead since I'll have to do that for half of them anyway.

Cheers everyone :)
 
Well chaps, I bit the bullet and went through with the upgrade to my DCs tonight. Made sure they were both up to date, took Veeam backups and cracked on with it. Everything worked! Well, almost everything - I had to re-auth the DHCP services. But that was it! AD all ok, DNS all ok, CA role on the primary server all ok... it was so smooth it was genuinely spooky.

Tempted to try the DFS servers next, I'm feelin' lucky :D
 
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