Rob's Blog

A quick disclaimer: this should work for the entire IBM DS3xxx series, but I’ve only tested with the DS3300. Your Mileage May Vary!

So I’ve decided to have a go with some pre-release software and use Hyper-V R2 server. I work with several clients who rely on Windows Server 2008 Enterprise using Hyper-V in a clustered manner and either Enterprise R2 or Hyper-V R2 sound perfect for them. Cluster Shared Volumes are a brilliant idea and bring Hyper-V much closer to VMware for management ease. Specifically on my SAN I’m using IBM’s DS3300 iSCSI platform so to try this out I went about trying to get the RDAC MPIO drivers installed on the Hyper-V R2 beta.

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One really annoying thing about the VMware Tools installation is that it reverts the video mode back to 640×480 for Windows Server Core installations; barely enough space for the command prompt. This can be fixed very quickly. Run regedit (one of the few GUI tools in Server Core) and find the keys DefaultSettings.XResolution and DefaultSettings.YResolution. Hint: they’ll be in a subkey of HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Video\. Change these values from 640 and 480 respectively (another hint: change the value from hex to decimal!), reboot and you’re good to go.

I’ve found myself using Windows Server 2008 Core quite a lot recently, and apart from using the GUI CoreConfigurator I’ve realised that I’m often completely forgetting a whole bunch of commands related to Server Core setup. Now nine times out of ten I’m working from a prepared Sysprep image with Group Policies setting everything I need; but every so often I forget or am setting up a test lab and need these commands. Anyways, here’s a list of codes that I use very often.

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Well, with Windows Server 2008 actually being released today I thought I’d put down in writing how I configured a server for one of our branch offices here. I decided that for a small office we’d need DHCP, DNS and a domain controller. However, this being a branch office with no IT function within it, this gave me the perfect opportunity to play with the Windows Server 2008 Read-Only Domain Controller (RODC) role within a Windows Server 2008 Core installation.

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Microsoft’s forthcoming server platform, Windows Server 2008, is out pretty soon now. So, as I’m going to be deploying this pretty soon after its release, I thought it a good idea to start playing with one of the more interesting parts of Windows Server 2008, the Core installation.

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