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I am setting up transactional replication on my 2008R2 server to 2012 distribution server to 2012 Subscriber server. All the three servers are on FULL recovery mode. Log backup is taken every 15 minutes and full backup is taken daily everyday on all the three server databases used in replication. We want to use the subscriber as a reporting server. Publisher is our main OLTP database.

But the Subscriber SSMS is 2012 SSMS and Publisher SSMS is 2008r2, so replication is throwing error: "The Selected Subscriber does not satisfy the minimum version compatibility level of the selected publisher"

So, I am thinking to use my Distributor machine (2012 server with 2012 SSMS) to remote into my publisher (2008R2 server) and then setup replication of the publisher from there. Should it work fine? Or, will it cause any issues.

Or, should I better be installing 2012 SSMS on my publisher server and then setup replication from there?

Please help

I had insatalled 2012SSMS on test server publisher and it was working very well. But dont want to get into licensing for 2 SSMSs

Would I then be able to rollback (remove/delete) replication easily incase there is an issue if I use a different server (not the actual publisher server) to setup replication?

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A Publisher running SQL Server 2008 R2 supports a distributor running SQL Server 2008 - SQL Server 2022 and a subscriber running SQL Server 2008 - SQL Server 2014 (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/replication/replication-backward-compatibility?view=sql-server-ver16).

The issue is that SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) performs some validation of the versions involved in the backend but the SSMS version shipped with 2008 R2 probably isn't seeing SQL Server 2012 as a valid version of SQL Server, since it wasn't available when SQL Server 2008 R2 was released.

The SSMS version has no impact on the supportability of replication between SQL Server versions, however, you might run into these kinds of issues due to the GUI not being up to date on current versions, i.e. SSMS 2008 R2 can't verify the distributor version is valid and supported.

One solution is to use SSMS on the server with the highest version in the Replication topology and do your setup/configuration from there.

Another solution would be to install the latest version of SSMS (latest can be downloaded here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/ssms/download-sql-server-management-studio-ssms?view=sql-server-ver16 - on your local machine and do your Replication setup from there.

Another solution is to setup and configure Replication using T-SQL commands instead. This can be complicated if you're unfamiliar with Replication already, but the commands are well documented:

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  • Thanks HandyD If I "use SSMS on the server with the highest version in the Replication topology and do your setup/configuration from there" - then would i be able to delete replication successfully from the same server? (in case I have to do rollback )
    – user25935915
    Commented Sep 4 at 8:21
  • Yes, if you can connect to the server to setup replication then you can connect to it to remove replication as well.
    – HandyD
    Commented Sep 5 at 4:03

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