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We have two servers that host two Windows 2008 servers with HyperV. Each of these servers has over 10 virtual machines (Exchange 2003, Active Directory, etc).

We have decided to upgrade it to Server 2012 (and upgrade the Exchange to 2013). However, we do not want downtime. What is the best way to achieve it?

Do I purchase an additional server? make it sandboxed and deploy the image of the first server and upgrade there and once tested, replace it with the first server?

Please help

Thank you

user200417
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1 Answers1

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Live Migrate the guests to a single host if you have the capacity. Reinstall the now empty host with 2012 (R2 hopefully). Live migrate all the guests to the 2012 server, reinstall the second server with 2012. Balance the guest workloads.

If you don't have the capacity to do this, then yes - buy new hardware.

MDMarra
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    And if you do not ahve the capacity, then consider getting professional for that ;) I.e. buy it. multiple hyper-v servers without one in reserve is reckless for a company. What you do when a server fails? – TomTom Nov 24 '13 at 15:55
  • Can you do live migration between hyperv 2008 and 2012 hosts? Can you put them both in one cluster? – Grant Nov 24 '13 at 21:16