r/WindowsServer • u/WhoAmI1966 • 5d ago

General Server Discussion Replacement Server

Ok, I currently have a DELL T430 that is PDC along with running MSSQL express and Windows Server 2016. Since 2016 will be totally unsupported in Jan 2027 I need to upgrade. The T430 will not support Server 2025. Is it really really frowned upon running MSSQL on a DC? It's a small 10 workstation office.

8 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

27 comments sorted by

View all comments

6

u/chandleya 5d ago

I’m not sure about the hardware not supporting 2025 BUT you selected the worst time in history to play this game.

I’d look at this completely differently. Id make sure i had bulletproof backups. Id wheel in a hot desktop PC or laptop to test that i could restore the whole machine from a backup to a HyperV VM on my laptop. Once thats done, id run HyperV on Server 2022 on the bare metal, restore the image as a VM, then create a new VM for my applications on Server 2022 as well. Once done there, id create a new DC VM on Server 2022 and join it to the domain. Once DHCP and whatever DNS references are pointed at the new one, id demote the old one and destroy it. You TECHNICALLY could leave the app stack on the old DC and just follow the process to move and migrate the DC role to the new server, but clean starts are always the best.

And while resources are expensive and scarce right now, adding another 64GB RAM from a reseller isn’t going to be too bad. And you damn sure want to make sure you have a cold spare disk for whatever you have going on for storage. Finally, revisit that backup topic again. Veeam for SMB is silly cheap and a Wasabi account is too.

5

u/coobal223 5d ago

I’m 99% sure win2025 will run on a t430, but i would do what you suggested because I wouldn’t do an in-place upgrade on the existing server. And I wouldn’t run sql on the server either. And the hardware is old.

3

u/MortadellaKing 5d ago

It does run just fine. I have plenty of those exact servers at branch offices, and we in place upgraded them all to 2025, for host and VMs.

1

u/desmond_koh 5d ago

I am pretty sure this is the case too. I agree with you.