Since Windows Server 2008 you’ve two options when installing Windows: Full installation or a Core installation. The Core installation is available for some server roles including the Hyper-V role. When you start the setup you’ve the option to choose between these versions.

OperatingSystem_Selection

As you can read in the description Server Core is a minimal installation of Windows Server without the standard Windows user interface, and with a subset of server roles that can be managed from a command promt. One of these server roles is Hyper-V.

Core or Full?

People ask me often what I do recommend: Core or Full. Well I definitely recommend the Core version for a Hyper-V server. I recommend Core because it is more secure, more stable and it needs less software updates. Pretty important things for a hypervisor which is responsible for your virtual infrastructure I guess.

Conversely I often get the answer: We prefer the Full version because this version is easier to manage. I think this is a wrong point of view. Management of Hyper-V is mainly done by System Center Virtual Machine Manager. This is a complete GUI based solution. Beside of that there are the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT). The SCVMM server is a logical candidate to install these RSAT because you allready use this server for managing Hyper-V and thus you’ve access to this server. Using these RSAT you can e.g. easily view the Event Viewer, use Failover cluster manager, use Hyper-V manager and so on…

Only during the installation and configuration you need some expertise. But don’t panic also for this phase there are some helpfull tools and references.

Tips for managing a Core installation

First of all I would like to point to the built-in option sconfig. When you run sconfig.exe from the Hyper-V console you can easily configure the following options:

sconfig

Second there is the Server Core Installation Option Getting Started Guide which you can find here. This guide provides instructions for building a server that is based on the Server Core installation option of the Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2 operating systems. It includes information about installation, initial configuration, and managing a server that is running a Server Core installation.

Then there is a tool called Core Configurator from Codeplex. This is a free open source tool and it uses PowerShell to set some configurations. From this tool you can configure a lot of settings through a gui:

  • Configure computer name, domain configuration and computer roles and features;
  • Configure network adapter settings, iSCSI settings, MPIO settings and proxy settings;
  • Configure licensing, activation and KMS options;
  • Configure Control panel settings such as Windows Update, display settings and firewall settings;
  • Starting and stopping virtual machines.

It is also possible to start taskmanager, Registry editor, a command prompt or view System Information. You can configure this tool to load at windows startup otherwise you can start it trhough the command prompt by executing the command Start_Coreconfig.wsf. You can download the tool here.

Last but not least you can use VisualCore 2008 from Guillermo Musumeci. Here is the download location. Another GUI based tool for configuring settings and view configured settings.

With the help of these tools (and certainly there are many more tools) it is not that hard to configure a core installation. So my advice is use the Core edition for such an important workload as Hyper-V is (btw Hyper-V server is also a good and safe choice offcourse).