Upgrade DC W2012 to 2016 restored with veeam

[baronej]

Good afternoon community,
We should upgrade our w2012 R2 Domain Controllers to W2016.
Our environment is VMware 6.7 U3.

Scenario:
Forest/Domain named: PALERMO
- 2 DC’s named DC01 and DC03 (DC01 holds the Global Catalog)
- A child of domain PALERMO named CPM where there are 2 other DC’s named CPM01 and CPM03.

On these last 2 servers we are not interested updating to W2016.

We would like to do a painless operation that creates the least possible disservice.
I have seen several tutorials, videos on how to upgrade to W2016.
We need to do an in-place AD ​​Upgrade of DC01 and DC03 from windows 2012 R2 to W2016.
I was wondering if I could take advantage of VEEAM.

I would like to restore the entire two VM’s DC01 and DC03 (which we save daily) with veeam in an our VMware node and attest them on a standard switch without uplink (isolated network),
so that when these servers are started, we have no impact on our production.
At this point, we update the operating systems on these two restored servers.
In this regard, I followed a nice tutorial (https: // www. Youtube.com/watch?v=UcdZRrwcpnM)

As soon as the two servers DC01 and DC03 (the restored server) are updated to W2016 and ready,
i would like to turn off our current production DC01 and DC03 (the W2012 R2) and start the new DC01 and DC03 and move them to the VMware Port Group of our production.
Do you think it is a viable operation?
What happens to the CPM child domain servers?
Have you had any experiences about it?
Sorry for my bad english.
If you have any suggestions I would be happy to receive help. Thank you!

[HannesK]

Hello,
AD is a distributed high-available service with multi-master replication. I would go with the classic way: setting up new servers and remove the old DCs. I know that there is a snapshot protection built-in protection against USN rollbacks. But I see no advantage in taking the risks of what you plan.

In theory your plan could work (my AD knowledge is a little bit outdated), but I would always go the classic way.

Best regards,
Hannes

[foggy]

Please review this article for some domain controller recovery peculiarities.