Hyper V or not Hyper V

[kevin2003]

Hi,

My company is looking to upgrade to 2008 server R2 from 2003 server R2; 2 DC in 2003 to 2 new DC in 2008. I was just want to do a straight upgrade from 2003 to 2008. I ran into a consultant who told me I should look into Hyper V since I have both old and new servers. Is it a good idea in my scenario to implement Hyper V? what are the downside of doing this verse a straight upgrade???

Thanks,

Kevin

 

[hairlessupportmonkey]

Or you could use VMWare and use the standalone converter to "import" the machines into VMWare.

From there, you could build your new servers along side it without any disruption.

ACSS - SME
General Geek

 

[cajuntank]

While you can go the VMWare route, you can also do the Microsoft route as well using their P2V (Physical to Virtual) tools as well. Some backup softwares no have this ability as well also. It's normally best practice to install new opposed to trying to do in-place upgrades.

That being said, you don't go into much further discussion about your setup except for the 2 DCs, so without knowing some additional information about your possible other servers or hardware that you have now or will implement, it's kind of hard to tell you to just jump into virtualization. Virtualization offers many advantages like getting better utilization of hardware (several servers can be run on one physical box assuming you have enough resources for said virtual servers), VMs being hardware agnostic (no special manufacturer drivers needed in the VMs themselves), redundancy (only if you are in some form of cluster environment), etc...

I personally run one dedicated physicall DC and the rest of my DCs are virtual (on different Hyper-V clusters)...but that's me and my preference. Some will only run dedicated physical DCs, some will run all virtual DCs. Each scenario has pros and cons and just depends on what you personally are confortable with.