Rob's Blog

Initial Setup of Windows Server 2008 Core

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.

I’m planning on running a Core installation with Windows Virtualisation installed to replace my current Windows Server 2003 Enterprise/Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 cluster. A Core installation provides the benefit of being completely stripped down, providing maximum resources to my Virtual Server instances.

Now, the theory’s all well and good – but what about in practise? How easy is it to set up the environment I’m talking about? Well let’s see, shall we? First off I’ll do a standard Windows Server 2008 Core install, clustering it (if this is even possible – I’m not sure yet!), adding IIS to the installation and finally trying my luck at sticking Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 on it.

After installing Windows, the first thing you’re likely to want to do is fiddle around with the networking settings. We’ll do this through the netsh command.

netsh interface ipv4 show interfaces
netsh interface ipv4 set address name=idx source=static address=192.168.0.11 mask=255.255.255.0 gateway=192.168.0.1

The couple of lines of code above are used to firstly retrieve the Idx of the network you want to configure and then secondly to set the IP address, network mask and gateway. I’ll be honest and say I haven’t really used the netsh command particularly frequently – I’m pretty certain I’ll be using it a lot more frequently in the months to come.

Next up, you’ll probably want to configure a few DNS servers. The following lines of code demonstrate this:

netsh interface ipv4 add dnsserver name=10 address=192.168.0.2 index=1
netsh interface ipv4 add dnsserver name=10 address=192.168.0.3 index=2

The first line of code adds the DNS server 192.168.0.2 as the primary DNS server and the second line adds 192.168.0.3 as the secondary. Simple! You can of course add more than two – just increment the index by one for each DNS server you want to add.

You’ll also find that Microsoft’s server naming convention is a bit of a pain in the arse. First thing I did was to change it to something sensible, using the netdom command:

netdom renamecomputer computername /NewName newcomputername

What else would you need to do? Well, joining a domain is something that’s always handy. Using the same netdom command as above,

netdom join ServerName /domain:DomainName /userd:UserName /passwordd: *

The little star at the end prevents the password you type in being displayed on the screen, which is always handy.

Both of these commands need a reboot – this is easily achieved using the shutdown command. But first, you’ll need to activate your server:

slmgr.vbs –ato

Now your Windows Server 2008 Core installation is ready to go! Unfortunately, I hit a bit of a barrier here – for the life of me, I couldn’t get Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 installed. If anyone’s had any joy with this please let me know!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 at 3:23 pm and is filed under Windows. Find similar posts by selecting any of the following tags: server core, windows 2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.