In-place Server 2019 upgrade - advice sought

[Blue407]

Hey All

I have a 2016 physical server that has B&R server installed on, backup to local repository on the server, plus iSCSI repository, plus tape.

Any advice on doing an in-place upgrade of Server 2016 to 2019?
Anything to watch put for thats specific to Veeam? Maybe disable all Veeam services before upgrade?

I want to make use of Server 2019 ReFS , block cloning and de-duplication. Currently one iscsi drive is NTFS and the other is ReFS. I would imagine its going to be a pain to get them both to ReFS and dedup/cloning?

Thanks in advance for suggestions, ideas etc.

[ejenner]

You'll most likely have to reload all the data into the repositories from scratch. Copying the data into the drive after you've completed the Windows setup and formatted with W2019 ReFS will work... but where are you going to store your backups while this is happening?

[Blue407]

The server has a C: and D: drive, the data is only on the D: drive. I may have enough storage on iSCSI etc to copy the backups away. I have 3 copies of most backups anyway, on different servers/media
I would hope all the other Repositories would still be populated in the system, as they won't be touched to start with.

[ejenner]

yes, but then you won't benefit from any additional features in 2019. It will still be formatted in the 2016 version of ReFS.

[Blue407]

I assumed, maybe wrongly, that if its ReFS it would be upgraded with the new ReFS features. Is there an upgrade path?

[bhnelson]

It sounds like it's automatic (from 2016 on at least) and also a one-way street. Be cautious.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/ ... d-p/293297

[ejenner]

I assumed, maybe wrongly, that if its ReFS it would be upgraded with the new ReFS features. Is there an upgrade path?

Probably past the limits of my knowledge but I believe the system you use to format a drive initially is the formatting it will always have. As 2016 and 2019 use different versions of ReFS (which is why you want to upgrade) you will find the volume formatted with 2016 ReFS will continue to be formatted like that. It won't upgrade the formatting of the disk to 2019.

Same as if you were to migrate from a 2008 box which had an NTFS volume which you left as it was... you wouldn't expect it to be automatically reformatted to a different file system just because you upgraded the OS on the OS drive.

Another reason for this chain of thought would be that some of the facilities of ReFS are applied on ingest and not as an ongoing task. So if the data was put into the drive as ReFS 2016 having it addressed by Windows 2019 instead of Windows 2016 won't change the data to Windows 2019 data. Maybe if you added new data it would apply 2019 techniques but this wouldn't happen without the drive being reformatted as a 2019 drive.

[r0bbienz]

Slightly different but I have attached a 2016 REFS formatted disk to my 2019 backup proxy server and the synthetic full fast cloning has gone down from 1hr 30mins to 10mins

So keeping the 2016 REFS formatted seems fine in my case

[gregsmid]

It sounds like it's automatic (from 2016 on at least) and also a one-way street. Be cautious.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/ ... d-p/293297

Can confirm. We did an in-place upgrade of our proxy/repo server from 2016 using fiber-attched ReFS disks to 2019, and ended up wanting to revert it back to 2016 at one point. We had a backup of the OS volume in its 2016 state, so we reverted... and it could no longer read any of the ReFS disks.