Dumb question, I should know the answer with all my years in IT...

T

The Cobra

2[H]4U
Joined
Jun 19, 2003
Messages
3,182
So I am sitting at home today and want to upgrade our last physical DC (Sitting at 2008R2) to either 2012R2 or 2016 and did not want to drive into work today to do it. I have managed to outsource all of out email/student files to O365, an amazing product. Finance (Sage 50 hosted) and video and pics to Razuna. All we have left is roughly 2TB of local storage that is being backed up to a LTO-7 drive onto one tape that I carry home with me each weekend. Our budget is limited compared to my last school job in Seattle when I moved back east last year.

If I were to remote into the server, could I extract the ISO and just do an in place physical upgrade and allow the server to reboot as normal and then remote back into it and finish the setup? The server itself id a Dell R210 pizza box. It was sitting in storage after never being used from a donation from a parent that works at NASA. I installed 2008R2 because we were having permission issues after I had retired the old 2003 AD servers. Once I brought up the forst and domain to 2008R2 levels, the permission issues went away after everything had synced up. I moved all the FSMO roles to our new VM of 2012R2 and still have a physical box of 2012R2 that is our main DFS File server and BackupExec server.

Advice? Thank you :)
 
Hard to say, but I would have a contingency in place to run over at the drop of a hat if it doesn't allow remoting back to it. I can test this is a VM next week though :)
 
I did an in-place upgrade from 2008 R2 to 2012 R2 a while back. You can just run the upgrade from within the OS and it should completely install without you having to do anything special.

The only word of advice I have is... it may keep coming up with warning in server manager that one or two things are not working even though they are.

It really is better to do a clean install.

Nobody can guarantee that it won't run into issues during the upgrade though.
 
Eulogy said:
If it's an R210, do you not have iDRAC access?
Click to expand...

Good question, I don't know if it does/doesn't. I just held off on the upgrade for the weekend and will perform tomorrow during the day since I have two other DC's with services installed (DNS/DHCP)
 
i would set up that iDrac if you have the module they are very useful for remote support.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top