Sara Perrott - Windows Server 2022 & Powershell All-in-One For Dummies

IN THIS CHAPTER

Installing the prerequisites to support a successful installation

Doing a clean install of Windows Server 2022

Upgrading from a previous version of Windows Server

Performing a network install with Windows Deployment Services (WDS)

You’ve made the decision: You want to install Windows Server 2022. Great! You may be wondering what’s next. One of the most important things you can do to ensure a successful installation is make sure that you’re meeting all the prerequisites for Windows Server 2022. By ensuring that you have the appropriate hardware to meet the needs of the operating system, you can definitely save yourself some headaches later.

When you’ve got everything necessary to install Windows Server 2022, you’re ready to go. In this chapter, I walk you through how to perform a clean install as well as an upgrade install. I also explain how to do a network install with Windows Deployment Services.

You should know that you can’t change between Server Core and Server with Desktop Experience anymore. This capability was removed in Windows Server 2016, in order to support the newer Windows 10 desktop experience on the server, rather than the older legacy desktop experience you had with Windows Server 2012 R2. If you install Server Core, and then change your mind and decide you actually want Server with Desktop Experience, you need to reinstall it. If you try to use the Windows Server installation media to move between Core and Desktop experience, you won’t be given the option to keep anything.

Microsoft publishes the prerequisites for each of its operating systems. Some of the hardware requirements are independent of which edition of Windows Server you’re planning to install; other hardware requirements vary based on whether you’re installing Server with Desktop Experience or Server Core.

Windows Server 2022 is available only as a 64-bit operating system; there is no 32-bit version available. When you run the installer, you’re presented with options for the Standard edition or Datacenter edition. At the same time, you choose whether you want to install Server Core or Server with Desktop Experience.

Where I discuss minimum requirements in this section, it’s important to understand that these are the bare minimums to successfully install Windows Server 2022. You should not expect your server to perform well if you give it the specs listed here. For any real workload, your server should have faster processors, more processor cores, and more memory.

So, what are the absolute bare minimums that you have to meet in order to install Windows Server 2022? Read on.

For the most part, there aren’t many differences between the minimum requirements of Server Core and those of Server with Desktop Experience. The one very important exception to that is the amount of random access memory (RAM). The minimum requirement to install Server Core is 512MB of RAM; Server with Desktop Experience needs a minimum of 2GB of RAM.

If you’re installing Windows Server 2022 Standard, you should base the hardware specifications on the requirements of the workload you’re intending to run. If you choose to run Windows Server 2022 Datacenter, you may want to look at installing better hardware. A great example of a use case for the Datacenter edition is as a Hyper-V host. The Datacenter edition doesn’t limit you in terms of how many virtual machines (VMs) you can run. Your hardware will really be the limiting factor. In this use case, you would want multiple cores and a lot of memory.

The central processing unit (CPU) is the brains of the outfit. It processes instructions made by the program and/or applications. The CPU requirements for Windows Server 2022 are pretty easily met by most modern processors:

1.4 GHz 64-bit processor: Considering that the operating system is an x64 system, it makes sense that the processor must also be an x64 processor. Even a cheap server with a lower-end processor should be able to meet the 1.4 GHz requirement with flying colors.

Supports No Execute (NX): When the NX bit is enabled on certain areas of memory, the processor will not execute anything in that memory space, which can provide protection against malware. Areas protected by the NX bit usually contain things like processor instructions or data storage. Intel may refer to this technology as XD (short for Execute Disable), while AMD processors refer to it as Enhanced Virus Protection (EVP).

Supports Data Execution Prevention (DEP): DEP provides additional protection against malware that may target memory locations.

Supports CMPXCHG16b, LAHF/SAHF, and PrefetchW: These settings are specific to the processor, and there are multiple whitepapers published on the specifics. CMPXCHG16b is an instruction set supported by most modern x86_64 processors. Load AH from Flags (LAHF)/Store AH into Flags (SAHF) is needed to support virtualization. PrefetchW provides improvements to performance when using AMD processors. You don’t need to memorize these things — just know that these processor features can speed up execution of tasks and add some additional security features as well.

Supports Second Level Address Translation (Extended Page Table [EPT] or Nested Page Table [NPT]): This feature is especially important if you’re planning on running Hyper-V. It improves the performance of the VMs on the system and takes some of the pressure off the hypervisor, which can, in turn, improve hypervisor performance.

You may be curious how you can tell if your CPU supports these requirements. Microsoft offers a tool that is part of the Sysinternals suite named Coreinfo; this tool tells you what your processor is capable of supporting. You can download Coreinfo for free from the Microsoft website ( https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/coreinfo ). The file you download is a compressed zip file, so you need to extract it first. Then launch a command prompt to run the utility. To run Coreinfo, simply type coreinfointo the command window and you get a report of all available and unavailable features. Available features are marked with an asterisk (*), and unavailable features are marked with a hyphen (-), as shown in Figure 3-1.

FIGURE 3-1:Running the Coreinfo utility on a Windows system.