Windows 8 “Beta” – First Look

April 13, 2012 admin Windows Server 2012, 0

So despite several attempts and countless searches through “Goooogling” and Twitter I finally gave up trying to build Windows 8 Beta server on my Esxi 4.1 Farm.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/microsite.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=2006859&sliceId=1&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1

Anyways, I turned back to my trusted companion on laptop – VirtualBox.

Binary Installation

I didn’t bother taking any screenshots for this for the following reason:

Its most probably going to change by the time we reach Consumer Preview / RC , I suppose
If you are reading this post you probably have installed Windows 2008 , 2008 R2 and Windows 7 machines a few million times over J

So type your administrator password for your first time login

You can use the small “Eye of the tiger” button to see what you have typed.
Got to love that login screen, maybe try the Windows 7 hack to change the logon screen?
The usual suspect , Server Manger is opening at this stage
First and foremost was to setup RDP onto the server , so that I can jump in from RoyalTS

Server Manager Dashboard

A good place to start would be customizing the Local Server settings

Click on Local Server and you get the following page

This server will form the basis for the following roles:

Domain Controller
DNS
DHCP

Quick look at all the Roles and Features available

Click on Dashboard and Click on Add Roles and Features from the right hand pane.
Select the server from your server pool

There are a couple of Interesting Roles and Features that would need a deeper look

An attempt at dcpromo gave the following window

Right, so it’s back to GUI for the time being at least.

Wanted to power up ADFS too to have a peek at it since I am doing a SharePoint project with ADFS component at work at the moment

Choose Application initialization which is built into IIS8. Basically it performs the functionality of a warm up script for your Web Applications J finally !

Time to get some coffee J

Maybe a refill as well

You can close the wizard and view the progress via a Tasks Notification found on the top right hand corner

Post installation a task details window will display all the necessary further steps that are required for completion

So this was just a first look at how Windows 8 Server “Beta” and any future versions would look like. There is tons more features to look at it so keep an eye out over here !