Did you know that you should breakup with server 2008 R2

 Hey Guys.. I am here with yet another exciting post about ConfigMgr current branch (1511). A month before we decided to install ConfigMgr 1511 in a test environment and evaluate the product to ensure that it suits our PROD infrastructure with all the other services connecting in.

 I was really stumbled when I found out about the depreciating features of ConfigMgr vNext (1511) while I was reading through the features and pre-requisites of it. Looks like we can not use Server 2008 / 2008 R2 as a site server / site system anymore. The support for these OS versions will be removed right after year from the release date of ConfigMgr 1511. This is the same for SQL 2008 R2 as DB as well.

Read more here https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt210917.aspx

 But we have all our servers running server 2008 R2 and the only option available to to have ConfigMgr 1511 PROD is to perform a side by side migration from 2012 R2 Sp1 to ConfigMgr 1511 with server 2012 as site systems/site servers. But this is clearly not an option for us since we had a lot of objects to migrate and we really don't wanna mess with how things works now. 1511Since upgrading our PROD environment to ConfigMgr 1511  is one of the milestone for this year, We decided to look at other options to upgrade to 1511 without having to perform a side by side migration.

 Luckily we came up with a plan which does not involve a side by side migration.

This is how we are planning to perform the upgrade from ConfigMgr 2012 R2 SP1 to ConfigMgr 1511.

1. First, we will build a ConfigMgr 1511 infrastructure on windows server 2012 R2
2. Upgrade the existing ConfigMgr 2012 R2 SP1 to ConfigMgr 1511
3. Perform "Migrating to new hardware" steps to migrate the infrastructure.

The above is just the outline of we are thinking and we are developing the plan into action. I will keep you guys posted on how it goes.

Update :  Since ConfigMgr Current Branch now supports in-place upgrade of site servers from 2008 R2 to 2012 R2, you could choose that approach as a simple and safe approach

 S A Delphin