Upgrading Networker Server OS

Hello,

We are currently running Networker server with Windows 2008R2 on physical server. Since Windows 2008 is almost end of support, we need to upgrade our OS to Windows 2012 or 2016. We currently do not have budget to buy a new hardware with new OS. We have few options we would like to consider including virtualize our backup server. Once it is running on VM, we have the capability to use snapshot for rollback in case anything happened during OS in-place upgrade. What do you guys think on running backup server on VM?

Maybe anyone have any idea how to proceed with this OS upgrade?