How can FNMS be retained if the OS is being upgraded?

[iammanzi]

Good Day Community

I have a question around OS upgrades regarding FNMS. I will give an example. We have FNMS 2019 installed on a Windows Server 2012. We would like to upgrade the OS to Windows Server 2016 and at the same time retain FNMS. Can that be done? Do we require a re-install?

[erwinlindemann]

Hi Manish,

specifically when moving to Windows Server 2016, Microsoft recommends doing a Migration (moving roles roles or features and its data to a different computer) over upgrading roles and features on the same computer.

As an example, I would not trust that all user accounts and settings for IIS 6 on an old Windows 2012 OS are migrated correctly to the latest IIS  version running on Windows 2016.

The amount of work for doing a fresh installation of FNMS on a clean Windows 2016 OS should be reasonable. Most FNMS configuration settings are stored in the SQL Server database which is not affected by your migration.

Basically, you have to make sure that all FNMS server software prerequisites are met, create the Windows account(s), run the FNMS setup and then run the configuration PowerShell scripts.

Piece of cake, really 😎.

[WheresThePizza]

I completely agree that the best approach would be to do a migration of the OS instead of an in-place upgrade, and doing a clean install of FNMS on the new server. Doing this would also allow you to keep FNMS up and running, and could remain running if any issues were faced in the migration.