I would like to thank you if you were one of the persons that attended my Windows Server 2008 Server Core session during the Dutch Launch event on March 6th, 2008. I had a blast being one of the speakers and I thought it would be a good idea to give you all a little insight in my presentation and the virtual Server Core machines I used in my demos.

Perhaps this will help you perform Server Core tricks in your environments, whether they'd be your current Active Directory environment or a Server Core session you might be preparing.

Tools

Hardware

I have decided to use 1 laptop. This laptop is a Dell Latitude D630 with 4GB of RAM my boss gently provided to me. Within Virtual PC 2007 I used 3 machines with Windows Server 2008 Server Core and 1 machine with a full installation of Windows Server 2008. The Server Core guest machines were provided with 512MB RAM and the fully installed Windows Server 2008 guest received 1GB RAM.

Besides my laptop I used hardware to make my demos and presentation run smoothly:

• Default Dell USB Mouse
• Logitech Wireless Presenter
• 160GB USB 2.0 hard disk (used for back-ups)

Software

The laptop was installed with a 32bit version of Windows Vista Enterprise Edition with Service Pack 1, Office Powerpoint 2007 with Service Pack 1 and Virtual PC 2007.

I used Virtual PC 2007 with 32bit Windows Vista instead of Hyper-V with Windows Server 2008,because of a couple of reasons:

1. Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V disables sleep mode, which I felt was inconvenient since I needed this laptop for other purposes besides this presentation.
2. I use the laptop for other purposes as well (movie publishing, blogging, etc) and use tools that aren't certified or tested on Windows Server 2008 or 64bit versions of Windows.
3. I don't need the extra performance Hyper-V offers.

Tools

Besides the apparent software to run the machines I used SysInternals ZoomIt to provide most convenient zooms on the output of some of the commands.

Content

My session was primarily focused on the following three areas:

Windows without windows

The first part of my session was aimed at annihilating the prejudices on Server Core. Mainly these prejudices focus on differences in licensing costs between full and Server Core installations and the total lack of a graphical shell in Server Core. Both statements are untrue. The invalidity of the latter statement was proven in the first demo in which I showed how to:

• Change the password for the administrator account (blank by default)
• Change the keyboard lay-out using intl.cpl
• Change the time and time zone using timedate.cpl
• Change the hostname using netdom
• Change the IP address and DNS Server address using netsh

After rebooting running cscript SCregEdit.wsf /AR 0 provided the means the RDP into Server Core from the Full installation.

The Lean Mean Server Machine

The second part of the presentation and the second demo were on a typical "Deploy and forget" scenario: the Server Core Domain Controller. I showed opening up the firewall using netdom to allow remote management through MMC's from the full installation.

I began with a simple example showing inspecting the Event logs from a Server Core box on a Full Installation. Further along the line I ran dcpromo in unattended mode as described in Microsoft Knowledgebase article 947034. After this lengthy action (which I skipped by switching to a different saved Server Core installation that I had promoted earlier) I connected to the Server Core box using the Active Directory Users and Computers Management Console.

The conclusion of this part of the session was when you've installed Server Core and it's role you should not even have to feel it's a Server Core installation anymore: It's just like a normal server, but with one difference: It's a high performance one.

Less is more

The third and last part of my session revolved around placing Server Core machines in situations where the strengths of Server Core can be harnessed and the apparent lacks of Server Core aren't felt. A couple of scenarios I sketched were:

• The typical kitchen cupboard server at remote locations
  (Read-Only Domain Controller, DNS Server, Bitlocker, File Server, DFS-R)
• The high performance virtual cluster
  (Hyper-V, Windows clustering)
• The Web 2.0 server
  (IIS 7, Fast-CGI, MySQL, PHP)

I've shown the promotion of the third Server Core box to a Read-Only Domain Controller after shrinking the disk using diskpart through the Windows Remote Shell. (which almost resulted in trying to format the system volume…)

After that I showed the output to the oclist command to make people understand the immense list of possible combinations of Server Core roles and Server Core features.

Concluding

I will be happy to send you my (Dutch) deck of Powerpoint slides when you need to perform a session and need input for it.

I believe everyone dedicated at presenting on Windows Server 2008 should receive the kind of support I received. It makes presenting at these kinds of events a real joy. I won't bore you with the whole list of people that helped me. (this would take an additional 15 minutes of your time)

Thanks everyone.