2012 to 2012r2 with Cluster Storage

[garethEds]

Evening All,

 

Myself and @rich_tech are starting to research the upgrading of our 2012 HyperV system to 2012r2. We have two servers and around 10 VMs spread over both. All VMs are stored on a SAN and it all works lovely.

 

We are now looking into upgrading to 2012r2.

 

The opinion seems to be that an in-place upgrade cannot be done, so were were going to move all VMs to a spare server, then breaking the cluster before rebuilding the servers, rebuilding the cluster and then adding the VMs back in.

 

Anyone done this? Any advice? Any web links?

 

Surely there has to be an easier way.

 

GJE

[Norphy]

Nope, that's what you need to do. If you try to do an in place upgrade on a clustered system, the installer detects the cluster and refuses to proceed.

 

Apparently the next version of Windows server will do this but you're out of luck if you're going from 2012 to R2

[m25man]

Unfortunately that's right...

[garethEds]

@rich_tech will be pleased :-)

 

Thanks everyone.

 

GJE

[m25man]

The fact you only have two nodes on your shared storage means that you have more reasons than most to migrate to Hyper-V3

Functions like HyperV Replica and SMB Share support make it a must have, we have done a few now and to be honest as everyone is setup identically out Hyper V guy does them in a couple of hours.

Make sure you've done all your homework and got all of the right drivers, update your server firmware if there is such available.

With all of you're eggs in one basket so to speak once your cluster is broken getting access to the Internet may not be so easy so get everything saved locally to avoid delays.