VSAN Free, Hypervisor Upgrade Best Practice -2012R2 to 2022

edmacfly · Mon Mar 13, 2023 12:05 pm

Hello,

I have been using VSAN Free at the small business I work for to enable a 2-node hyperconverged setup between two Windows Server 2012R2 servers for several years now. The servers are long overdue an upgrade and I have purchased new Server 2022 licenses and was wondering if there was a best practice guide to upgrading the nodes? Is it possible to evict one of the nodes, then do a clean install of Server 2022 and then reinstall VSAN before repeating the process on the other node?

Any help gratefully received, thanks,

Ed

Mon Mar 13, 2023 12:58 pm

Greetings,

I guess the question rather relates to Windows Server and migration between two different OS. In other words, there are no stoppers from the StarWind VSAN perspective, but a big stopper from the Hypervisor and Clustering interoperability.
Based on my experience Windows Server 2012R2 and 2022 cannot be clustered together due to different Hyper-V capabilities and Cluster levels. What you can do is move to Windows Server 2016 as described here (https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/c ... erver-2016), then to 2019 in a similar fashion and then to 2022.
If that's too long for you: just back up the infrastructure according to backup best practices https://www.starwindsoftware.com/best-p ... practices/, install and set up VSAN as described here (https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resour ... rver-2016/) and restore it to the new system.

edmacfly · Mon Mar 13, 2023 1:11 pm

Hi Yaroslav,

Thank you for the excellent response. The first (but longer option) actually sounds okay as it will result in minimal (to zero) downtime. I will consider this further then begin planning my next steps...

Thanks again,

Ed

edmacfly · Mon Mar 13, 2023 1:20 pm

In theory, could I:

1. upgrade Node 1 to 2016
2. then, upgrade Node 2 to 2019
3. then, upgrade Node 1 to 2022
4. and finally, upgrade Node 2 to 2022

All while keeping the guests systems online?

Thanks,

Ed

Mon Mar 13, 2023 1:40 pm

You are always welcome!
Theoretically, yes, but I never tested this method.