14 DAY TRIAL // Just yesterday, I was telling you that Microsoft was offering resources designed to help administrators manage Server Core installations of Windows Server 2008 R2. Today is reserved for a tool also designed to streamline administrative work associated with Windows Server 2008 R2 Server Core installs: namely Core Configurator 2.0. An open source project hosted on Microsoft CodePlex, version 2.0 of the Core Configurator is tailored specifically to the latest iteration of the Windows Server operating system, and is designed to make up for the lack of features, including no Windows Shell/GUI, of Server Core deployments.
Core Configurator 2.0 “is completely open source so it can be amended and changed to fit your requirements, this version has been a year in the making and has been written in powershell with a reference to Winforms so that a GUI format is displayed,” explained Justin Zarb, a Project Dedicated Supportability engineer, part of Premier Field Engineering within Microsoft UK. “The primary focus of this project is to try and get feedback and contributions back from the community to make this a tool the best/ free tool everyone will want in there toolkit, so if you have some code or features that you might want included then please leave a comment and we will get in touch.”
Core Configurator 2.0 has been released under a Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL), which, of course, is an open source license. In this regard, customers can grab both the ISO image of the solution, or the actual source code. Users must understand that version 2.0 is designed to integrate exclusively with the R2 build of Windows Server 2008, namely Windows 7 Server. Via the Core Configuration users can easily perform a wide series of tasks in Server Core installations of Windows Server 2008 R2, including: Product Licensing; Networking Features; DCPromo Tool; ISCSI Settings; Server Roles and Features; User and Group Permissions; Share Creation and Deletion; Dynamic Firewall settings; Display | Screensaver Settings; Add & Remove Drivers; Proxy settings; Windows Updates (Including WSUS); Multipath I/O; Hyper-V including virtual machine thumbnails; JoinDomain and Computer rename; Add/remove programs; Services; WinRM; Complete logging of all commands executed.
“The entire tool is just a bunch of PowerShell Scripts. Truly amazing stuff. I just spent half an hour pouring over the code in these scripts to see how they are able to do half the things they manage to do,” stated Ben Armstrong, a program manager on the core virtualization team at Microsoft. “If you have not enabled PowerShell on your core server – the launch script will offer to do so automatically. So it is very easy to get up and running. Along with all the usual server core configuration stuff - this release has basic support for Hyper-V which allows you to list virtual machines, start and stop virtual machines, and view the thumbnail of running virtual machines. If you are planning to use this to setup server core inside a virtual machine – you can also download the tool on a .ISO file – which lets you easily connect it to your virtual machine of choice.”
Core Configurator 2.0 is available for download here.