Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Server 2008 upgrade to R2 - PART 1

I decided to upgrade some of my 2008 servers to R2 last night, so I started with my Domain Controller (running Windows Server 2008 Enterprise).

My DC is a virtual, so I took a snapshot first, and then inserted the DVD (well inserted the "virtual" DVD iso). As with the original installation of 2008 - everything is quite intuitive for anyone with previous Windows server administration experience... like to start with a big button in the middle of the screen saying "Install".

So you click "Install", and select whether or not to check for updates & provide feedback (yes, yes), then select the version (Sandard, Enterprise, Datacenter, or Web), and choose Upgrade or New installation.

Choosing upgrade then goes on to run compatibility tests ... and if you don't prepare your DC with the R2 schema, then the tests fail and you get a "Windows Compatibility Report" HTML document on your desktop with a link to a Microsoft article and some info telling you what needs to be done before you can upgrade. In the case of a DC, you need to prepare the AD schema for R2, and to do this you open up an Administrative command prompt and go into the \support\adprep directory on the installation disk, and run adprep.


In my case, my DC is the only one on the network, so it is the "everything" master. So the first command to run is:

adprep.exe /forestPrep

and then:

adprep.exe /domainPrep

Now we can run the R2 upgrade... kick it off, then sit back and relax while it runs!


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