Upgrading Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 to 2016

[Renan Frozza]

Good morning everyone!

I have a Win2012R2 with Hyper-V that needs to be migrated to Win2016.

The Hyper-V have 2 disks in raid1 for system and 4 disks in raid5 to storage the VMs.

Is it possible to only format the C:\ and install the 2016 and recreate the VMs and pointing them to the vhds in the storage?

Or the right procedure would be to firts export the VMs and import later?

[#2]

Hi there. Maybe the option with export/import will be better if you have spare free space to make the export.

From my expirience when I delete a VM and use the VHD\VHDX to new one (no matter if the name and settings are the same) at least the network settings are gone and sometimes addtional setup is required.

Actually for a single host machine best practise is export/import. I beleive that your RAIDs are hardware managed, not software, right? Otherwise you will lose it.

One other option to consider is the in-place upgrade - from the other colleagues`s posts seems to be pretty clean and problem-free option. If you choose this option just keep in mind to shutdown all VMs and remove all "saved" states.