sglee

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@kevinhsieh<br />
As you suggested, I ran setup.exe from extracted W2012R2.ISO file on Windows 2012 and it successfully upgraded OS to Windows 2012R2.<br />
I continued to upgrade &nbsp;Windows 2012R2 to Windows 2016 using the same method and it worked great!<br />
Thanks for your help.
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@kevinhsieh
As you suggested, I ran setup.exe from extracted W2012R2.ISO file on Windows 2012 and it successfully upgraded OS to Windows 2012R2.
I continued to upgrade  Windows 2012R2 to Windows 2016 using the same method and it worked great!
Thanks for your help.

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Hi,<br />
&nbsp;<br />
&nbsp;I have a test Hyper-V Server 2016 and installed Windows 2012 Server for in-place upgrade testing purposes.<br />
&nbsp;So I opened the virtual machine settings for Win2012 and performed the following:<br />
1. changed the ISO file to Win2012R2.iso.<br />
2. Start the VM and pressed [F8] key and got to Windows 2012R2 setup menu.<br />
3. Clicked &quot;Install&quot; and I tried both &quot;Upgrade&quot; and &quot;Custom&quot; option.<br />
&nbsp; &nbsp; - &quot;Upgrade&quot; option did not do anything except I saw the message saying that I have to restart the computer.<br />
&nbsp; &nbsp; - &quot;Custom&quot; option said it was going to put old stuff in &quot;Windows.old&quot; folder. After customer upgrade, a brand new OS was created with Windows 2012R2. It was not an upgrade from Windows 2012.<br />
<br />
&nbsp;Having said that, this was not what I expected.<br />
&nbsp;How can I perform in-place upgrade to a newer server OS while keeping programs, files, computer name, IP information ... etc?
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Hi,
 
 I have a test Hyper-V Server 2016 and installed Windows 2012 Server for in-place upgrade testing purposes.
 So I opened the virtual machine settings for Win2012 and performed the following:
1. changed the ISO file to Win2012R2.iso.
2. Start the VM and pressed [F8] key and got to Windows 2012R2 setup menu.
3. Clicked "Install" and I tried both "Upgrade" and "Custom" option.
    - "Upgrade" option did not do anything except I saw the message saying that I have to restart the computer.
    - "Custom" option said it was going to put old stuff in "Windows.old" folder. After customer upgrade, a brand new OS was created with Windows 2012R2. It was not an upgrade from Windows 2012.

 Having said that, this was not what I expected.
 How can I perform in-place upgrade to a newer server OS while keeping programs, files, computer name, IP information ... etc?

In-place upgrade of virtual machine

This topic area includes legacy versions of Windows prior to Windows 2000: Windows 3/3.1, Windows 95 and Windows 98, plus any other Windows-related versions including Windows Mobile.

Windows OS

Windows Server 2012 is the server version of Windows 8 and the successor to Windows Server 2008 R2. Windows Server 2012 is the first version of Windows Server to have no support for Itanium-based computers since Windows NT 4.0. Windows Server 2012, now in its second release (Windows Server 2012 Release 2) includes Foundation, Essentials, Standard and Datacenter, and does not support IA-32 or IA-64 processors.

Windows Server 2012

Hyper-V is a native hypervisor; it can create virtual machines on x86-64 systems and supersedes Windows Virtual PC as the hardware virtualization component of the client editions of Windows NT. A server computer running Hyper-V can be configured to expose individual virtual machines to one or more networks. Hyper-V Server supports remote access via Remote Desktop Connection. Administration and configuration of the host OS and the guest virtual machines is generally done over the network.