Upgrading via Hyper-V

[Eric]

So, we have a single physical server which we need to upgrade from 2008 to 2012. I am considering building a brand new server in a hyper-v partition and migrating over to that. This will take care of (1) years of cruft everywhere (2) setting up NPS with a brand new certificate (for wireless auth, especially) (3) changing the domain name to something which doesn't clash with an existing .com! etc.

 

What do you think? Can this work? Would it be reasonable to keep the new h-v machine as the new server forever, or do I need to think about migrating it back onto physical hardware? Should I be able to create a new partition and install an h-v "base machine", in the new domain, which I can then use to manage the h-v server?

 

If I've made any glaring errors it's because I would know much better how to do this using Vmware, which isn't available here.

[Blue_Cookeh]

I must admit, I just did in-place upgrades on our Hyper-V servers from 2008R2 to 2012R2, there wasn't enough to lose if something went wrong for me to be bothered about reinstalling fresh.

[kevin_lane]

we have around 30 servers across 5 host(ish) and we have done in place upgrades we also did inplace upgrades of our vms expect for our pupils and staff server where i have had to rebuild them from scratch. i think along as you have a solid backup via either dpm or veeam then you should be ok. i know a lot of people don't like hyper-v but its quite solid really