William Leggett

I have been asked recently to upgrade a variety servers to Windows Server 2008 R2. I wasn't sure due to the variety of different flavours of Windows Server currently being used which would be able to upgrade and which ones were not possible.

After a bit of digging a round i found all the answers and i have put them into tables for you to use, should you need them.

Unsupported Upgrade Scenarios

• Upgrades to Windows Server 2008 R2 from the following operating systems are not supported:
• Windows® 95, Windows 98, Windows Millennium Edition, Windows XP, Windows Vista®, Windows Vista Starter, or Windows 7
• Windows Server 2003 for Itanium-based Systems, Windows Server 2003 x64, Windows Server 2008 for Itanium-based Systems, Windows Server 2008 R2 for Itanium-based Systems
• Cross-build type in-place upgrades (for example, fre to chk) are not supported 
• Cross-architecture in-place upgrades (for example, x86 to x64) are not supported.
• Cross-language in-place upgrades (for example, en-us to de-de) are not supported.
• Cross-edition upgrades (for example, the Windows Server 2008 Foundation SKU to the WindowsServer 2008 Datacenter SKU) are not supported.

• Cross-build type in-place upgrades (for example, fre to chk) are not supported

Supported Upgrade Scenarios

Note

Windows Server 2008 RTM is marked as "RTM-SP1" because a user sees "Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 1" in the system information.