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I thought R2 is a patch/service pack. I’ve been looking for a download but dont see one. I assume therefore that R2 is a new version, and that I would need the install media for sqlserver 2008 r2 to do an upgrade?
Also, would I need to pay for new licenses?
SQL Server 2008 R2 is a separate product. If you have bought your current SQL Server 2008 with Software Assurance (supplied by most software vendors who sell MS products), then you can upgrade at no cost.
Now for the fun part … You’d think that doing an in-place upgrade from 2008 to 2008 R2 would be a snap. Be warned – it failed on me twice in a row. Luckily we had taken a VM clone and restored it as a test server first, to try out the upgrade. The two times it failed was for two different arcane reasons. The network guys were getting frustrated because they had to keep restoring a fresh test server from the clone. Be absolutely sure that you first test an in-place upgrade in a test environment before you touch your production server. When the in-place upgrade fails, it trashes your SQL 2008 instance and the final message from the installer is to uninstall and reinstall SQL Server. We just decided to instead do a clean R2 install on a new server. Extremely disappointing, since SQL Server is probably the most stable and reliable MS product.