Server Core Archives

Configuring Windows Server 8 Core with DHCP Failover and Replication!

In consulting with clients over the years for Virtualization, VDI and Cloud initiatives, an inevitable conversation that surfaces is DHCP high availability. While Microsoft allows Enterprise customers to protect DHCP in a Failover Cluster, my experience is that this option lacks mass adoption due to licensing requirements, increased complexity and an added dependency on the quorum storage (also a single point of failure). Another option involves an approach called DHCP split scope whereby two servers provide addresses for the same subnet, but do not overlap. This results in wasted address space, sometimes significant in the case of VDI with multiple [...]

By Dane Young, MBA|March 19th, 2012|Microsoft|0 Comments

Implementing a Multi-Node Hypervisor Cluster on a Single Desktop Running VMware Workstation 8

As a field consultant for the last several years, I have been amazed at the numerous deployment scenarios that can be reproduced utilizing just one piece of physical hardware. Due to increasingly expensive electrical bills I trimmed down my server class lab hardware nearly a year ago in favor of a megadesktop that could handle anything I threw at it. While dual-, tri- and quad-boot scenarios have given me the ability of running ESXi, XenServer, Hyper-V, and Windows 7 natively on the hardware, it has been difficult to reproduce complex multi-node hypervisor cluster scenarios without wrangling additional equipment. With the [...]

By Dane Young, MBA|October 8th, 2011|Citrix, Microsoft, VMware|6 Comments

Windows 2008 Server Core: My First Choice for Role-Based Infrastructure Services

If you haven’t evaluated Windows 2008 Server Core, now’s the time! Server Core is the ultimate choice for infrastructure services that are role based, utilizing any of the following: Active Directory (Including LDS and Certificate Services), DNS, DHCP, File Services (Including Distributed File System Replication), Hyper-V (Although I would utilize the Hyper-V installer), Print Services, Streaming Media Services and IIS. One of the benefits of Server Core is security by default. Server Core was designed to be a stripped down role-based Operating System with a dramatically minimized security footprint. In addition, Server Core reduces maintenance, management, and storage footprint, ultimately [...]

By Dane Young, MBA|April 14th, 2011|Microsoft|1 Comment