With the imminent end-of-life of support for Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2, we’ve received questions from customers surrounding the supportability of upgrading the base OS with Lync or Skype for Business Server installed on it. With this in mind, we wanted to provide a few key points in this area.
- It is not supported to upgrade the base OS with Lync or Skype for Business Server installed.
- All servers within a pool must run the same OS.
- Paired pools must run the same OS.
Attempting to do so will cause problems, up to and including catastrophic failure of the pool.
The recommendation is to build a new pool to replace the existing pool and move users to the new pool. The previous hardware or resources can be used once the old pool has been drained of all users and workloads; this is known as the 'swing' upgrade method. Effectively, it would be a similar process to migrating Lync or Skype for Business Server versions.
Resources:
Migration:
Migration from Lync Server 2010 to Lync Server 2013
Migrating to Skype for Business Server 2019
Pool Pairing Guidance:
Supported pool pairing options and best practices for Lync Server 2013
When you plan which pools to pair, you must keep in mind that only the following pairings are supported:
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Enterprise Edition pools can be paired only with other Enterprise Edition pools. Similarly, Standard Edition pools can be paired only with other Standard Edition pools.
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Physical pools can be paired only with other physical pools. Similarly, virtual pools can be paired only with other virtual pools.
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Pools that are paired together must be running the same operating system.
