Hyper-V Host In-Place Upgrade

[dchappell]

I've got Veeam B&R 11 backing up some vm's on a hyper-v 2012 r2 host. Are there any special steps that I would need to take to do an in-place upgrade from Server 2012 R2 to Server 2019 on the hyper-v host?

Thank you,

[HannesK]

Hello,
and welcome to the forums.

I think that question fits better on the Microsoft forums

My personal opinion on in-place upgrades of Windows servers: never ever do that. It causes more problems than it solves. Maybe it becomes better with 2019, but the last time I tried it with 2016 I just broke everything (well, the wizard told me before that this will happen)

From a Veeam side: you need to have a correctly working host. Then Veeam works.

Best regards,
Hannes

[Natalia Lupacheva]

Hi David,

Our QA team is checking such in-place upgrade with B&R v11.
I will come back to you when we get the results.

Thanks!

[dchappell]

Hannes,

Thank you. I generally do try to avoid doing in-place upgrades but this server is just running Hyper-V and in the past similar upgrades have gone without issue for me.

My question was less to do with doing the windows upgrade and more to do with how will Veeam handle it. Don't know if I can just do the upgrade and Veeam will detect and adjust or will I have to do something to force Veeam to recognize that the server is now running a different version of Windows/Hyper-V?

Thank you,

[foggy]

In-place OS upgrades are not supposed to change anything Veeam B&R related, so typically transparent to our software. But let's wait for the test results from Natalia to be 100% sure. And regardless of the test results, make sure you have a Veeam B&R configuration backup prior to performing the upgrade procedure - just in case.

[Natalia Lupacheva]

Hi David,

We've quickly tested an in-place upgrade.
The guys are right, there are no strict contraindications from Veeam side, but such upgrade can be difficult.
If you have a huge environment, there's a lot of combination tasks and we cannot be sure we will be able to find the easy and fast solution for the issues caused by the conflicts between the hosts' and virtual machines' versions.
Also when we've upgraded 12R2 to 19, the guests were disconnected from the network.
So, we didn't find any un-fixable problems, but you will have stuff to fix for sure and it will take your time.
So if you are afraid of these versions' conflicts, I would say it is easier (and probably will take less time) to raise a new host and migrate your machines to it.

Thanks!

[TheOnlyWizard17]

Microsoft only supports in-place upgrades OS-version N-1, so to get from 2012R2 to 2019 one would have to upgrade 2012R2 to 2016 and upgrade that to 2019.
We've done it multiple times, Hyper-V servers and otherwise, without any real issues...
That said, 2012R2 would use NIC Teaming for networking, whereas the new default for 2016 Hyper-V and up is a SET Team, so you would have to change that anyways. Also, 2012R2 Hyper-V usually uses NTFS storage, whereas the new default from 2016 and up is ReFS, so you would have to change that aswell.
Meaning, it might be easier to just deploy new 2019 hosts and migrate your VMs to that, if you have the hardware available to do it that way. You'd still have downtime, converting the VMs from v5 to v9 configuration version, but that could be a quick stop-vm, convert, start-vm...