Windows 2003 - Upgrade vs. Full Install

[DrMario]

Hello -

I am running Windows 2000 Advanced Server on an app server and need to get it upgraded to Server 2003. I know the best practice is to do a clean install of 2003, however, I have a critical application on the server and I think an inplace upgrade would be less risky.

Has anyone ran into issues with an inplace upgrade from 2000 to 2003? Is there any post-upgrade cleanup needed or any 'gotchas' I need to watch out for?

thanks for your advice

 

[Roadki11]

Well in theory you should be able to do an in place upgrade if you have enough disk space and the apps are 2k3 compliant. Problem is you never know how its going to come out until you do it. I would test the upgrade first, you can do this one of two ways(probably more) that i have used in the past. First would be to ghost the 2k server to dvd or a spare hard drive then run the upgrade, if it goes south fast you can just restore the ghost and be back at square one with little risk. The second i would use if you dont want any down time while testing, use vmware's free server and migration tool, you can virtualize the 2k server into vmare without taking the server offline then run the upgrade in vmware and see how it works out. If option two works to your liking i would then proceed with option one.

RoadKi11