Server 2008 Installation

If you read this web site you will see a section dedicated to the most prolific and widely used server operating system: Windows Server 2003, this server has been installed on more servers than Novell, Linux, and now long forgotten IBM Server OS/2  combined. I know that there are people that will try to point out the Linux is ahead in the count however while I was gainfully employed by one the largest banks in the USA; the Server 2003 to Linux ratio was close to 99 to 1, in the data center that I was responsible for over 100 servers; there were over 4000 in racks, I knew of one Linux server in the area where my servers were racked, when asking other admins assigned to the data center they could only point to one or two Linux servers.

Server 2008 Installation starting the setup:

If big business don't buy in to the fix or repair daily OS then how come the propionates of these operating systems think they have the edge? A server should be robust in hardware and the Operating System. Once powered on and setup complete the maintenance (not hardware wise) should be for updates to the OS for better performance, programming errors, and security, not driver recompiling, kernel failures, etc.

A few choices...

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Released in October of 2009; Server 2008 Installation is modeled after the older Windows 7 workstation, most of the primary setup mirrors the Windows 7, the main changes are in the graphics. Once past the file extraction and copy sequence the setup, will as normal for Windows Operating Systems do a few restarts.

Moving along

Notice the size of this drive- 40 GB; I installed this version on a VM Ware Virtual Machine with 8 GB of ram and 4 processors (not one processor with four cores...)

Type of installation... This has to be a clean installation not an upgrade, that selection will fail - No previous Operating System installed.

Copy and extract files.

Now a restart.

After the restart...

After services another restart.

This is normal after Vista...

When you set the password it has to have complexity...

Now to log on, this will disappear from non domain servers / workstations in server 2019 / Windows 10...

Still waiting...

As with all Windows products bigger, and more... Is that better?

The shutdown tracker, this information is stored on the server, you can turn it off with a GP (Group Policy).

First step: Best Practices: create a user id and give it Administrative rights, only use the Administrator ID for special instances...

Last step is also a Best Practices: Rename the Administrator, Some organizations require a set name and then will send a batch file to change the Administrator's password when the server is joined to a domain.

As with any post Windows XP / Server 2003 Operating install expect to have an additional partition for the "System Reserve" this in reality is the boot partition for starting the Operating System. Normally this would not concern a setup with a RAID Array using a mirrored OS drive, you would not want to do a multple OS setup on a production server.  Although small it does take away from your partition count, so instead of having four partitions to use you effectively have three because the System Reserve takes one, the Server 2008 Installation takes another, you have two left if you have only one drive in the server.

On my first setup went fairly smooth, a few things to do after the install was to set up Active Directory, however to install AD you have to have DNS and / or DHCP installed and operational before the AD install.

Onward with the adventure of the Server 2008 Installations, DNS, DHCP, the Active Directory, then another install for the PDC, the last install will be for IIS 7.5 -- Fun!