Windows Server 2016: Virtualization Deep Dive on Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) course

There is a new course on Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) to talk about Virtualization on Windows Server 2016. Windows Server 2016: Virtualization Deep Dive is hold by Matt McSpirit, Technical Evangelist, and Ben Armstrong, Principal Program Manager Lead, Hyper-V. If you are a big fan of Hyper-V, you must know Ben Armstrong. They talked about Hyper-V on Nano Server, Containers and other new features on Windows Server 2016 Virtualization. Don't miss this MVA course to learn what's new in Windows Server 2016 Virtualization.

This posting is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights!

A new Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) for Nano Server

There is a new Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) course, A Deep Dive into Nano Server to talk about how to install, manage and troubleshooting Nano Server. This course is held by Matt McSpirit, Technical Evangelist, and Andrew Mason, Principal PM Manager, Windows Server Platform and tools. Don't miss this course.

This posting is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights!

Setup Nano Server of Windows Server 2016 TP3 version on Hyper-V virtual machines

In one of  Microsoft Ignite 2015 sessions, Jeffrey Snover introduced a new Window Server installation option, Nano Server, on the Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 2. In Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 3, Microsoft attached 2 PowerShell scripts on the installation media to let administrators to create a new VHD of NanoServer easily. At this moment, Nano Server supports the following features:

• Hyper-V Compute
• Windows Containers
• Storage Server (SOFS)
• Failover Clustering

For more information what Nano Server supports, please read Getting Started with Nano Server.

In this post, I will try to create a Nano Server VHD by the scripts which are provided by Microsoft. Then, boot the Nano Server VHD and VHDX on a Hyper-V Server.

Lab environment

• 1 x Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V Server

1. Log in a Hyper-V server as administrator.

2. Launch PowerShell as administrator.

3. Navigate to installation DVD path \NanoServer.

4. Perform . .\new-nanoserverimage.ps1 to load the PowerShell function.

5. Perform New-NanoServerImage -MediaPath <Source path of installation DVD of folder> -BasePath <Temporary folder path for conversion> -TargetPath <Target folder path> -<Feature Name> -EnableIPDisplayOnBoot to create a Nano Server vhd.

This script prompted you to enter the local administrator password for the Nano Server.

Eventually, the Nano Server was created on the destination folder.

Then, you can create a Generation 1 virtual machine and then attach the virtual hard disk.

Remark: The current script, New-NanoServerImage, created the VHD with MBR boot partition so we need to use generation 1 virtual machine to mount it. To use generation 2 virtual machine for Nano Server, we can update this script manually to change to vhdx with GPT boot partition. Based on my testing, I updated the following line numbers of this script.

Line 611, 701, 707, 925

As a result, we can set up Nano Server on virtual machines. To manage Nano Servers, we can perform PowerShell cmdlet, Enter-PSSession, to connect and manage the Nano Servers.

This posting is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights!