2012 on sigtar.com

change windows 2012 to core mode

Fri, 14 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +1200

Found yourself considering hyper-v? Microsoft has come a long way and is now becoming more popular as a serious contender in the hypervisor area. My preference is still VMware, but some businesses may find their Microsoft allegiance makes hyper-v a valid option.

Note, i do not consider Microsoft a “cheaper” solution in any circumstance. The current state of hyper-v, SDN options, clustering and VMM management falls very short of what VMware has out of the box. Anyhow, if you do choose windows, here is how you remove the GUI - hopefully saving you a little bit of RAM and reducing the running footprint open for attacks and vulnerabilities….

windows 2012 change key from evaluation to standard

Mon, 12 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +1200

get current version;

dism /online /get-currentedition

Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool Version: 6.2.9200.16384

Image Version: 6.2.9200.16384

Current edition is:

Current Edition : ServerStandardEval

dism /online /set-edition:ServerStandard /ProductKey:xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx /AcceptEula

Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool Version: 6.2.9200.16384

Image Version: 6.2.9200.16384

Starting to update components… Starting to install product key… Finished installing product key.

Removing package Microsoft-Windows-ServerStandardEvalEdition~~31bf3856ad364e35~~amd64~~6.2.9200.16384 [==========================100.0%==========================] Finished updating components.

Starting to apply edition-specific settings… Finished applying edition-specific settings.

The operation completed successfully. Restart Windows to complete this operation. Do you want to restart the computer now? (Y/N)

windows 2012 - dedup

Wed, 07 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +1200

If you have some archive data that you would like to copy onto a win 2012 server, but dont know how to estimate the end volume size (if VM etc). Start small - about 1/2 of the total capacity of the drive. Robocopy the data onto the drive until nearly full, manually run dedupe, wait until complete, continue robocopy, repeat and rinse. There will be occasions where you will run out of disk space at that point its time to extend your disk.