We appear to have 2 domain controllers in our enclave system, both running Windows 2008 R2/64-bit. They need to be upgraded or replaced by newer 2012 R2 versions of the same. Of course I realize that in-place upgrades of them are strongly discouraged, but an apparent caveat to the replacement is that the newer DC's have to retain the same server names and IP addresses (I've been told there are 'things' in the enclave that point to the DC's strictly by IP or something, and thus any changes on the name/IP for them would cause those applications to break). They are also functioning as primary/secondary DNS servers.
Based on the whole 'they need to have the same machine info' angle, I was leaning towards attempting an in-place upgrade of both DC's maybe over a weekend where user impact would be minimal. However I think in a perfect world it would be really nice to spin up two 'new' machine, get them all patched, etc., and then cut over to them. I just have no idea how I would accomplish this while still maintaining the same machine names and IP's.... is that even possible?
My apologies in advance for my lack of knowledge, I have never set up or administered a Windows DC (well, not in over a decade anyway) so I'm sure there's a ton of stuff I'm not even considering.
I did quickly run a "dcdiag /a" on the current Master DC and it seemed to pass all tests with the exception of "test SystemLog".
