[sc:windows-category ]Yesterday I upgraded my Hyper-V servers and now its time to do the domain controllers, DFS servers and SQL server.
As always, backing up the system is a must and as my DC’s are all VM’s, I simply shutdown the systems and copied the VHD’s to a safe location.
After that the next step was to run ADPREP, as always getting the forest up to date before installing the first 2012 DC was simple enough. No issues were reported when running ADPREP.
As with the Hyper-V servers, I had to un-install my anti-virus software.
As the DC’s are pretty clean installs I decided to do an in place upgrade to Server 2012 and after running setup a few issues were identified:
- Lack of disk space.
- Virtual Graphics Driver
The disk space is kind of surprising, admittedly I only gave the virtual systems a 32g system partition, but it did have over 8g of free space. Setup though wants 13g of space before it continues. I shutdown the VM and used the disk wizard in Hyper-V to expand the virtual disk to 48g. Then after rebooting the server, used disk manager to extend the system partition to fill the entire 48g.
To resolve the virtual graphics driver I assumed it would be just an update to the new virtual machine extensions from Hyper-V 2012. A quick reboot and a rerun of setup though brought me back to needing another reboot. After that the warning was still present but I proceeded anyway.
The upgrade proceeded pretty much as with the Hyper-V servers, once again sitting on the “Getting Ready…” screen for quite a while but eventually moved on. As I was doing the upgrade later at night, I simply let it run overnight and in the morning I was greeted with a completed install.
I didn’t receive any issues with the video driver, everything was fine after logging in so it seems safe to ignore the warning.
The second domain controller proceeded in the same way and completed without issues as well.
The final step was to move the forest and domain up to the 2012 functional level, which completed without issue.
Next up are the DFS file servers and the MySQL server. These are pretty straight forward and are all VM’s. Other than extending the disk space, proceeded without issue. After the upgrades to the DFS servers I did have to reboot my desktop as connecting to any of the shares on the servers came up with an access error. After the workstation reboot all was fine again though.
One item of note is licensing, I installed Windows Server 2012 Data Center edition on the Hyper-V servers and it comes with unlimited virtual instance licensing. Of course this means you have to install the same edition of Windows on the VM’s as you have on the physical host. The one issue I can think of with this is that you have to use the same activation key as on the physical host, which means moving servers between host servers requires an update to the activation key on the VM’s.
The only minor glitch on any of these systems after the upgrade came up on two of them. When installation was complete and I logged on for the first time, instead of the light blue theme, a light brown theme was selected. There doesn’t seem to be anything in common on the systems (One was a DFS server, the other was the SQL server).
Overall, a very easy upgrade, now on to other things.
