I downloaded the server 2008 beta 3 eval VHD from http://www.microsoft.com/vhd last week. Is it ever a cool little playground... Inside the package you get 2 VHDs already setup. 1 DC and 1 server configured only with server core. I was greeted at first by a blank server 2008 screen. I have used the other betas to mess around in a VMWare lab but nothing major. I also simulated the server 2003 labs in server 2008. I never tried server core yet...
So I was greeted by the blue screen and nothing else. Backstory to this is expanding the downloads in vista you need to do it 2X (at least I did) and it takes a LOOOOONG time... So naturally I fugured the VHD was FUBAR since as an ITPRO the problem could not ever be me...
Reboot, same thing. Damn. Now I have to work... Incidentally, the shutdown and reboot options are not there. However, when close option is selected in Virtual PC, one of the options available is to shutdown windows server 2008 Longhorn. Really nice integration with the virtual environment, quite impressive.
So I contact my fellow colleague Dan Neremberg, another ITPRO who is president of the Montreal ITPRO user group and ask Dan WTF??? (F is for Friday...) He tells me that this is server core. Then it all comes back to me. OK so this is a feature in server 2008 I have been dying to play with and now I will get the chance. Trouble is, greeted by only command prompt and if you close that, you need to CTRL+ALT+DEL again and launch the CMD shell again from task manager or you have nothing. This is Windows for god sake... how do I manage this... So my buddy Dan sends a helpful link to help manage the beast:
http://www.petri.co.il/managing-windows-2008-server-core-server-roles.htm
Pretty cool stuff to be had in there. To start us off, I run oclist to see what is running. Not too much. This link gives other details as well to manage the beast. More to come...
IT Pirate