In this section we will be covering the upgrading path of the existing legacy Hyper-V server operating system to the latest Windows Server 2012. Let's say in your organization you have two sets of Hyper-V servers. In the first set you have five standalone Windows Server 2008 R2 based Hyper-V hosts, and in the other set of servers, you have a five node Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V failover cluster hosts.

Now your company is planning to move forward with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V servers, to take advantage of numerous new features added into the Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V version. To continue this section, we have divided this into two parts; in the first part we will see how we can upgrade the standalone Hyper-V hosts to Windows Server 2012 operating system, and in the second part we will see how to upgrade the Hyper-V cluster servers.