We are running ESXi 6.7 and have a file server running Window Server 2012 R2. The OS is on the C: drive and the shares are on the E: and F: drives. The shares are using NTFS. We would like to migrate this to a new VM running Windows Server 2019. We have two choices of how to handle this migration. We do use DFS namespace which should make re-pointing things after migration easier.
- Make new file shares on the new server and use Robocopy to migrate the data. The first run of Robocopy will take some time but subsequent runs go quick since it just copies changed files. Do one last run of Robocopy over a weekend and change DFS to repoint things
- Unattach the VMDKs from the old server and then attach them to the new server using a method like this
https://ssh.guru/q-10-file-server-migration-using-vmware/
Any suggestions on which method to use? We will not be using ReFS on the new file server since ReFS still does not support everything that is supported under NTFS including not supporting disk quotas.