Wednesday 24 August 2016

Install Server Manager Rolls and Features on Non GUI Interface

By entering “sconfig.cmd” at the command prompt then pressing the “enter” key you will arrive at the following screen:
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First option we should take is to change the computer name.  Select option 2.  Provide a new name for the computer then hit the “enter” key.  The server will prompt you for a reboot, click on “Yes.”
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Once the server has rebooted re-launch sconfig.cmd and continue.  You can join the computer to a domain by selecting option 1, for sake of time in this lab, I will not be joining the server to a domain.  I will be providing an IP address however.  Select option 8 and hit the “enter” key. 
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Select Static “S”, then provide an IP address and DNS servers where applicable to your local subnet then select option 4 to return to the main menu:
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While Remote Management is enabled we need to run a command on our client machine that will be connecting to the server.  This will be performed on your Windows 8 client machine. To begin we need to get to the Powershell prompt. Return to the main Start screen of Windows 8 by pressing the Windows key. Type in “Powershell” and you should see the following screen, right click on “Powershell” and then click on “Run as administrator” at the bottom of the screen:

Now enter the following command replacing the <YourtargetServernameHere> with the server name both the short name and the fully qualified name(hint this might come from your home dsl router, mine did) of the target server. These will be added with quotations as seen here:
 Set-Item WSMan:\localhost\Client\TrustedHosts -Value <YourtargetServernameHere> –Force
Optional: I added a host file entry for the server name and IP address in my lab since I did not have a DNS server available yet. 
Be sure you can ping your server by name before continuing. Once that is complete you will want to install the Remote Server Administration Tool for Windows 8.  After installing the RSAT suite, we test out the connectivity.  Return to the main Start screen of Windows 8 by pressing the Windows key.   Locate the newly installed suite of icons, I labeled my tile group as “Server Tools” as seen here:
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Launch Server Manager.  Now click on “Add other servers to manage”
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It will start searching the domain if your computer is joined to the domain, and you joined your server to the domain then it should find the server in the list.  Since I am operating in a workgroup for this lab, I had to manually enter my server name by clicking on the “DNS” tab, then typing in my server name.  Once you see it populate below with the correct IP address, click on the arrow to move it to the right hand menu labeled “Selected”, then click “OK”:
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Click on the “All Servers” menu on the left hand side of the Server Manager screen.  You will notice that mine has a Kerberos error.  This is because we need to manage the server as a different administrator since my Server 2012 core machine is not a domain member.   Right click the server and select “Manage As…”
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Enter in the credentials too match your environment, mine looked like this:
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It should take you back to the Servers screen and you will hopefully see this type of “In progress” activity:
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Once the login process completes your screen should look like this:
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Now right click the server and see what functions are available to be performed:
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This will conclude part II of this series.  In our next installment we will turn on some Roles and Features.  If you are anxious to do more, you can always follow some of the other labs that were written for the GUI installation process, since nearly all of that process will work correctly as long as you stick to the RSAT tools as the GUI for your Windows Servers. 

Start Windows Server 2012 Without GUI Server Manager

How to Turn the GUI Off and On in Windows Server 2012

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When Server Core originally shipped, a lot of Windows admins avoided it because you could only use the command line, but this changes with Windows Server 2012 which enabled the use of a hybrid mode.

Turning the GUI Off

In Windows Server 8 the GUI has kept with the modular nature of recent Windows Server Operating Systems and in turn has become a “Feature”. This makes removing the GUI very easy. To get started launch Server Manager.
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Click on Manage, and then select Remove Roles or Features from the menu.
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Click next to skip past the before you begin page, then select your server from the server pool and click next.
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Since the GUI is not a Role, we can just click next again to skip past the Roles section.
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When you reach the Features page, you need to uncheck the box next to the “User Interfaces and Infrastructure” option, and then click next.
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Now tick the “Restart Destination Server” box, then click remove.
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The GUI will now be removed.
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After the binaries are removed your server will automatically reboot.
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Once it comes back up, and you log in, you will only be able to use the command line.
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Turning the GUI On

Once the GUI has been turned off, you will want to know how to get it back. To do this we use SConfig, so go ahead and type SConfig into the command line and hit enter.
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You can see near the bottom of the screen that we can use “12” to Restore the GUI, so type 12 and hit enter.
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You will be warned that enabling the GUI requires a reboot, click the yes button.
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That will kick off DISM which will start to add the binaries for the GUI Shell.
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When its finished you will be asked if you would like to restart the computer now, type “y” and hit enter to reboot.

GUI Off with PowerShell

You can do the same thing as we did in the GUI much quicker with a PowerShell cmdlet. To do so, open Server Manager, click on Tools and launch PowerShell.
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We can use the Remove-WindowsFeature cmdlet to remove the feature:
Remove-WindowsFeature Server-Gui-Shell, Server-Gui-Mgmt-Infra
Since Remove-WindowsFeature is just an alias, you could also use:
Uninstall-WindowsFeature Server-Gui-Shell, Server-Gui-Mgmt-Infra
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Not long after you have  hit the enter key, the removal will begin.
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When it’s done, you will be notified that you need to restart your server to complete the process, which can be easily done from the current PowerShell window by running:
Shutdown –r -t 0
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When your machine restarts you will only have the command line to work with .
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GUI On with PowerShell

The first thing we need to do is get into PowerShell, so type PowerShell and hit enter.
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Now we need to use the Add-WindowsFeature to add the components  back:
Add-WindowsFeature Server-Gui-Shell, Server-Gui-Mgmt-Infra
Again this is just an alias for:
Install-WindowsFeature Server-Gui-Shell, Server-Gui-Mgmt-Infra
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When its done, we will need to restart our server by using the Shutdown command:
Shutdown –r -t 0
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When your server reboots you will have the GUI back.