Tuesday, November 27, 2012

In Place Upgrade - Windows Server 2008 R2 to Server 2012 (Including Hyper-V)

I upgraded my developer workstation yesterday and it was unbelievably painless. I think this is especially noteworthy since my workstation is a fully functional desktop with everything from Office and Visual Studio to Chrome and mRemote. It also acts as a Hyper-V host for a number of machines I need to do my work.

Before starting I took several precautions, all of which were unnecessary:
  • Back up My documents
  • Back up Downloads
  • Defragmented my hard drives
and for my Hyper-V setup:
  • Compacted one of the drives that was too big
  • Shut down all machines
  • Deleted all snapshots
  • Set machines to use static MAC address
  • Exported VM's (in case I had to start from nothing)
I upgraded from a DVD. Server 2012 setup gives you one button - Install now. A little over an hour later, it was done. Everything still worked. One virtual machine needed to be set to allow MAC spoofing. I was back to work just like that!