Brien M. Posey: Rather than providing you with a generic set of instructions for performing an in place upgrade, I decided to upgrade a server that I use as a virtualization host for a number of lab machines. Before I began the upgrade process, there was a little bit of prep work that I had to do.

The first thing that I did was to make sure that I had the correct version of Windows Server 2008 R2. My server started out running the X64 version of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition, so I made sure that I had the 64-bit Enterprise Edition of Windows Server 2008 R2.