BE2012 to BE2014 - How to... Best practise... Agent versions. etc.

Hi all.

I would like to start testing the new BE2014 solution, I'm currently on BE2012 SP2.

What would be the best way to move forward with the plan.

One of the things I could not find info on... If I build a new win2k8r2x64 and install BE2014 and my current production BE2012 is on another server.

I read in the forums that the agents need updating for BE2014 to work better, but would they still work with BE2012, is there going to be two agents install at the same time, or is the 2014 agent backwards compatible with 2012?

Is there a trial version for the deduplication option?

We never used this before, and it would be intersting to see how much we could reduce traffice on network, by dedupe on client side...

Thanks, PS