Yes folks, I have been studying for my first Microsoft exam: Microsoft Windows Server 2012 70-410 with R2 updates! The first thing in the book is installing Windows Server. One of the useful features in Server 2012, Microsoft claim, is the ease in which you can move between the Core (the new default) and the GUI options.
Since there’s no substitute for trying it out, I installed server core and have spent many hours since using the published commands to try and upgrade it to a GUI, so far without success. Talk about falling at the first hurdle. This book is 400 pages and this is pretty much the first question in the test. Great.
Along the way I have learnt some stuff: how to remotely manage the server (in a workgroup), the key part of which is running
Set-Item WSMan:\localhost\Client\TrustedHosts -Value <YourtargetServernameHere> –Force
from a Windows 8 client with RSAT installed and having set the administrator password on the server and allowed remote management via sconfig
.
The published way to perform the GUI install is using the powershell command install-windowsfeature
. My results are as follows:
A Google of that revealed several suggestions, the majority of which suggest using the -source
switch and adding GPOs or editing the registry to change the behaviour of WSUS, none of which worked.
There are various options of syntax described for the -source
option but I have tried many and various and none of them worked for me.
The latest, and most promising blog was to be found at http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2012/09/20/windows-server-2012-shell-game.aspx
Which suggested specifying a wim file as the source using the following command:
Install-WindowsFeature server-gui-mgmt-infra,server-gui-shell -source:wim:d:\sources\install.wim:4
Great, I thought! This time it would be right, it would work and no one would have to get nailed to anything. Having invoked this command and let it think for 5 minutes (long past when it had failed before) I get:
Oh well, back to the virtual drawing board.