Our company has some 2003 domain controllers scattered around the world that need to be upgraded to 2008 before I can raise the forest/domain functional level to 2008 which is the prerequisite to another migration project coming up soon.
What I wanted to know is if it is safe to perform in place upgrades remotely (or even possible). Some of these machines are in offices in Asia with no on-site IT staff, so it would cause a lot of problems if they go down for extended periods of time.
To avoid problems with dhcp,dns, etc while doing the upgrades I have created a few windows azure VM's and joined them to the same active directory sites as the servers that need to be upgraded, but I will still have problems if the old machines go down in the upgrade process as some are also acting as file servers and print servers.
Thanks in advance for the...