Installing Windows 2000 Server T his chapter reviews the installation of Windows 2000 Server. It discusses a number of hardware configurations and setup options, and reviews potential obstacles. Installation and Configuration Strategy If you have read Chapter 4 and have done your homework, you will now be ready to begin installing Windows 2000 in your lab. You may be tempted, or you may have an urgent need, to go directly to a working or production system, in a production environment. Perhaps your DHCP server died, or a new DNS server is needed urgently, and so on. Resist, or stick with what you know. If you have an NT network and need to raise a new service to fill an urgent need, stick with Windows NT. On the other hand, if you are a seasoned administrator and you know what you’re doing, you will probably have items like a hardware checklist, remote or unattended installation, hot standby, and so on, well taken care of. So only go directly to a production system if you know what you are doing and the production system is part of a conversion and rollout project. For the most part, you should always raise servers in a lab. Then you should burn them in (run them continually) for about a week; hit them with work for at least another week. After that, and if all test items check off, then ship or go live. But no two environments are the same. Let’s look at the various installa- tion and configuration situations and then go from there. 5 5 CHAPTER ✦✦✦✦ In This Chapter Hardware Checklist Role Server Configuration Installing from Boot Disks Installing from the Command Line Installing over the Network The Boot File ✦✦✦✦ 4667-8 ch05.f.qc 5/15/00 1:58 PM Page 137 138 Part II ✦ Planning, Installation, and Configuration A lot of people ask how you burn in a server that is standing idle and has no users connected to it. One simple way is to set up NTBackup to run continually. Running backup is great physical therapy for a server. It works the hard disks, memory, sys- tem buses, access control, permissions and the NTFS, remote and removable stor- age functions, and more. You can also configure NTBackup (or any other backup utility for that matter) to perform both pre- and post-backup routines, such as send- ing alerts, moving files around the house, and so on. Depending on your stress test, you may need to write a backup script to automatically overwrite media, and so on. See Chapter 17 for more information. And if you want to test disk I/O and other routines, you might have to write some custom software for the job. Getting Psyched Up about Installing This chapter takes you through the basic install routines, and then to rollout and sophisticated deployment strategy. We are going to help you cook up a variety of server meals. Microsoft has spent many millions on the installation and configura- tion process. So, for the most part, Windows 2000 rises well for the power that it wields. It is certainly a lot smoother and friendlier to install than any other server operating system in existence (other than the machine you receive pre-installed from the factory). We have installed the operating system more times than you care to know and on about ten different platforms with a variety of hardware from scrap piles to brand names. We have also deliberately sabotaged our systems (like taking away drives, drivers, memory, and certain system files) and tried a variety of recovery tech- niques. What we have to report to you is as follows: If you experience any difficulty installing Windows 2000 Server, you must be using very unconventional methods, thrift store hardware, or not paying attention to details and recommended strategy. Now sit back, close your eyes, and imagine you are in a class going through installa- tion training. You’ll feel good thinking that you spent no more than the cost of a nice dinner on this book, and did not have to mortgage your house for a five-day course. Server Recipes In evaluating the various needs in the enterprise, we classified our installation into various recipes of server installation, which are discussed in the following sections. Low-road or bare-bones system recipe This option consists of using minimum hardware requirements to raise the server. You can use a no-frills motherboard with one CPU, the minimum RAM (64MB), a sin- gle IDE hard disk drive, a CD-ROM, a 1.4MB floppy disk drive, a standard network card, and a mouse, keyboard, and monitor (MKM). Note 4667-8 ch05.f.qc 5/15/00 1:58 PM Page 138 139 Chapter 5 ✦ Installing Windows 2000 Server Microsoft now ships the Server OS and the upgrade version with a note that 128MB is recommended. However, the installation will still get the green light if you only have 64MB. We have raised servers (both Server and Advanced Server) on CPUs ranging from old Pentium 133s, 166s, 200s, Pro 200s, and 266s, to Pentium II and III 300s, 450s, 500s, 700s, duals (two CPUs), quads, and so on. You can raise a Windows 2000 server on 133MHz and 166Mhz Pentiums, but we don’t recommend it for anything more than the smallest role server, discussed later. On the other hand, an old Pentium Pro with a lot of RAM will serve many of your needs. You can usually pick these servers up on the Internet for a song, and if they are good brands, they’ll do well for many years. Small file and print server recipe A small file and print server caters to small business’ file and print services. You should still use the bare-bones components, add a second large IDE hard disk drive for file and print services, the usual peripherals, and so on. The amount of RAM will depend on the number of connections and users. Printing services will require a lot more RAM than file services. If you are supporting a lot of printers, then go to 128MB of RAM and stick with no less than a Pentium Pro (a PII or PIII of 300Mhz and higher is better). Don’t be a chump and install 32MB RAM modules (unless they are lying in your top drawer gathering dust). In fact, it is almost impossible to buy anything less than 64MB nowadays. Check out the chapters on File Systems and Printer Services for fur- ther advice on hardware requirements (Chapters 21 and Chapter 23, respectively). Your hard disk demands will be higher, and you should now consider adding a sec- ond drive. You can stick to a cheap IDE disk (even the cheap IDE or EIDE drives are good disks) or begin thinking about SCSI. But let’s hold the thought about hard disks for later on in this chapter. You may have read information elsewhere calling for more firepower in a Windows 2000 Server. We would preempt that question with the answer that our assessment is based on various experiments, projects, pilot systems, and deploy- ment. Every situation is different, and the only way to really know what you need to throw at a situation is to test. Application server installation recipe Microsoft now uses the term application server to refer to a server running Terminal Services, but a server can still host applications without terminal users. You may want to install applications on servers for users who will load them into local mem- ory at their workstations. The application is thus loaded across the network, but the “footprint” and ensuing resource consumption is local to the user’s hardware. Note Tip 4667-8 ch05.f.qc 5/15/00 1:58 PM Page 139 140 Part II ✦ Planning, Installation, and Configuration You may also have applications that are server-based or server-oriented. These may include database front-ends, communications software, processing-oriented software, and network management applications. There may be hundreds of appli- cations that are suited to server-side execution and that need no user interaction, such as process control applications and data processing. You could use the recipe for file and print servers; it will take some testing to raise the ideal configuration for your purpose. Depending on the availability require- ments, you might need to add RAID, hot-insert drive-bays, and so on, which are discussed later in this chapter. Terminal Services installation recipe A terminal service application server is a whole new ball game. The WinFrame licensing arrangement between Citrix Systems, Inc., and Microsoft (see Chapter 25) was the origin of Terminal Services. Terminal server, under the Hydra project name, first made its debut in Windows NT 4.0 in late 1997. It was then launched as a sepa- rate NT 4.0 operating system called Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition (TSE). Terminal server is no longer a separate product under Windows 2000 Server. All servers come with Terminal Services built into the OS (see Chapter 1), and, as described in Chapter 25, you either configure Terminal Services as a remote Administration tool (which does not require licensing) or as an Application Server service (which does require licensing). This computing model is known as thin- client/server computing. With Windows 2000 acting as a Terminal Service application server, all your users run all their applications on the server. There is no such thing as a local Terminal Service client. The client can be a browser, a fat client running a Terminal Service terminal application (like a TN3270 character-based terminal running on Windows and accessing a DB2 database on the mainframe), a dumb terminal (known as Windows-based terminals), or terminals running on the Windows CE or Pocket PC platforms. Your users’ terminals can also be installed on any non-Windows platform, such as Macintosh, DOS, and UNIX, but these require the MetaFrame product suite from Citrix, which uses the ICA protocol. Terminal servers can be raised with any of the recipes discussed so far. However, it is not what you start up with, but what the terminal users do when they are attached to the server that matters. We have tested these services and deployed them in vig- orous real-life situations since 1997, and the following configuration pointers, which apply to a different configuration recipe we will shortly discuss, are key: ✦ Restrict your users from having more than four applications open at a time. For example, make sure they can comfortably open and run a database appli- cation, a word processing application, e-mail, and a Web browser. 4667-8 ch05.f.qc 5/15/00 1:58 PM Page 140 141 Chapter 5 ✦ Installing Windows 2000 Server ✦ Configure the applications to run without fancy splash screens, animations, or any resource-intensive software. This may not always be possible (see Chapter 25 for further information). ✦ Assign and enforce hard disk quotas. This is important to do for all users, but especially useful when you are dealing with terminal users. A server hosting no more than five terminal users should be running on a CPU of no less than 300MHz. Each user (depending on the applications and the type of pro- cessing) should be assigned no less than 32MB of RAM. You should also install fast SCSI drives and support them in hardware RAID configurations on fast controller cards. In short, there is no bare-bones situation when it comes to Terminal Services and application hosting. After all, if you were deploying to standard clients, they would likely each be above 266MHz with 32MB or more of RAM. At 32MB each, the recipe thus calls for the following total server RAM: ✦ Operating system = 128MB ✦ Five users @ 32MB each = 160MB ✦ Total RAM needed = 288MB You will probably have a hard time adding 32MB modules into a modern mother- board. Your configuration would thus be two 128MB modules and one 64MB mod- ule, or a single 320MB or larger RAM module. We have actually succeeded with less RAM, and you could count on a 300MHz system with 128MB RAM and a couple of fast IDE drives to service three to five users. But you should know that this will work only if you can guarantee that the users keep no more than two apps open (say their e-mail and one work app, like a database front-end). This latter “easier” configuration should be your bare-bones recipe for Terminal Services (to give users a reasonable work environment). We talk about which applications work well on Terminal Services in Chapter 25. Role server installation recipe Role servers are servers running services like DHCP, WINS, DNS, and Active Directory. Your application and needs may vary widely, depending on the service and how many subscribers it has. A small company might get away with a light- weight configuration, like the small file and print server recipe offered earlier. In other cases, you may require much more firepower, especially on medium to large intranets. For the record, we’ve been running DHCP, WINS, and DNS on Windows NT Professional on Pentium 200s with 128MB of RAM in each, servicing several thou- sand users over a nationwide WAN for several years. But there is a lot more replica- tion and dynamic configuration overhead with Windows 2000, and you might have to shell out for a Pentium II or III machine. Cross- Reference 4667-8 ch05.f.qc 5/15/00 1:58 PM Page 141 142 Part II ✦ Planning, Installation, and Configuration BackOffice, high-road, or mission-critical recipe Mission-critical servers should have no less than 300MHz in CPU capability. For the most part, and if you have more than a handful of users, your CPU should be more than 400MHz. You might consider equipment running two-CPU configurations, or possibly deploy quad systems. Hard disk needs may vary, but you’ll need to configure a second drive letter run- ning at RAID 5 under hardware control (in case you’re wondering, these are SCSI devices, which we discuss later). Redundant or stand-by system recipe Any of the server recipes mentioned so far could be cloned to provide an offline or hot spare. These are obviously not cluster or automatic fail-over machines. If the primary server goes down, you could pull dynamic volumes out of the primary arrays and install them into the hot spares. But a better solution, if you can afford it and have the budget, is to install Advanced Server and run cluster services and net- work load balancing. Large systems, clusters, and Datacenter server installations Advanced clustering (high availability) and Datacenter Server solutions are beyond the scope of this book, although most of the configuration information in this book will apply to the high-end operating systems. As discussed in Chapter 21, there is not that much difference between the operating systems, at least not from the aver- age user’s point of view. Any large system will call for an external SCSI-based stor- age silo under hardware RAID-5. The various recipes we’ve discussed so far are summarized in Table 5-1. Table 5-1 Hardware Guide for Server Recipes Recipe CPU/MHz RAM/MB HDD Bare-Bones 200 64+ IDE Small F&P 200-300 64+ IDE App Server 300+ 64+ IDE/SCSI Terminal Service 300+ 300+ SCSI-RAID Role Server 266+ 96+ SCSI-RAID BackOffice 300+ 128+ SCSI-RAID Standby 300+ 128+ SCSI/IDE Large 450+ 300+ SCSI-RAID 4667-8 ch05.f.qc 5/15/00 1:58 PM Page 142 143 Chapter 5 ✦ Installing Windows 2000 Server Hardware Choosing hardware is not a difficult exercise at all for Windows 2000 Server. There is really not a lot that you will put into your system. The list of hardware we will dis- cuss is as follows: ✦ Motherboards ✦ CPU ✦ Memory ✦ Hard disk drives ✦ HDD controllers ✦ Network interface cards (NICs) The Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) Before you go buying parts, review the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) in the \support folder on the Server CD, for your own peace of mind. If your part is not listed, check out the HCL on the Microsoft Web site at www.microsoft.com/hcl . You will probably find the HCL a little amusing because Windows 2000 has already been available to the leading manufacturers for more than a year as of this writing, and they have a ways to go before their products will be logo-compliant. Some pop- ular brands are not even listed as compatible, and some have even stated that they will not go for the logo . . . that in-house tests are good enough. Also, according to Microsoft policy, Microsoft will not support you if the item is not on the HCL, but not many items are on the HCL yet. And if you spend $195 with Microsoft to figure out if hardware is the reason a server will not start, will they refuse to take your money? They never have to date. Microsoft’s paid support team is very responsive and will help you determine if hardware is your problem. At least if they tell you that you have a hardware compatibility problem, that’s probably all the advice you’ll need. The HCL aside, you should heed the following advice: Most large companies will buy brands from the likes of IBM, Compaq, Dell, or HP, and so on. And if the budget is there, a small company looking for one business server should go this route as well. The servers will be burned in and tested, and the manufacturer will stand behind the compliance of its product running Windows 2000 Server, logo-compliant or not. The servers will also come with warranties and various levels of support, and you can get as much as a 30 percent discount on the operating system, which comes preinstalled. 4667-8 ch05.f.qc 5/15/00 1:58 PM Page 143 144 Part II ✦ Planning, Installation, and Configuration If, however, you plan to build your own server, or if you need to upgrade a machine down the road, then by all means buy your own parts and knock together your own server. However, for best motherboard results, try to stick to made-in-America com- ponents, or well-known and popular foreign imports. For RAM, there is only a handful of factories left, but you’ll be okay buying products from the likes of NEC, Compaq, IBM, TI, and others. For hard disks, IBM, Quantum, and Seagate are the leaders now and may soon be the only players. For CPUs, there’s Intel, AMD, and Cyrix. If you are thinking PowerPC and other marginal CPUs, you’ll need to talk to the likes of IBM or Motorola. The other peripherals will not interfere with your server. Motherboards Motherboards come in a variety of sizes and shapes. The essential components of a server motherboard are as follows: ✦ Mother form factor: Motherboards come in several sizes: AT (the form factor of most server boards), ATX, BabyATX, and MicroATX. BabyATX and MicroATX are aimed at the home and have fewer slots than you would want for a server motherboard. Go with AT or ATX. ✦ Slots: Slots come in three standards: ISA (the older and slower slots), PCI (which caters to faster data transfer rates), and AGP (Advanced Graphics Port), which is more suited to graphics components (not becoming of a server). Most motherboards include all three of the slot types. Since AGP is for a graphics interface card, there is usually only one AGP slot. Choose a motherboard that gives you about two ISA slots and four to five PCI slots. ✦ RAM slots: The RAM slots include SIMMs and DIMMs. SIMM slots are the older 72-pin slots, and the modules have to be mounted in pairs. DIMM memory is much faster. DIMM modules come in 168-pin slots, and the memory can be mounted as single modules. You can put more DIMM RAM in a server than SIMM, which is important for future expansion. ✦ CPU Sockets: The CPU sockets include Socket 7, Slot 1, and 370/PPGA. Socket 7 is the older Pentium Pro-type socket, which is inserted like a pancake into the motherboard sockets. Slot 1 CPUs are for the new Pentium II and III CPUs, which are inserted into a single slot and protrude away from the motherboard. Slot 370 CPUs are cheaper than Slot 1 CPUs and are for the Intel Celeron PPGA CPUs. One of the top motherboards in the United States is SuperMicro, which supplies many leading brands. You can buy SuperMicro boards at Motherboards.com , which sells several other leading brands, including Soyo. Soyo is gaining market share and is becoming very popular with places like Best Buy and CompUSA. Another mother- board maker that has become popular is Tekram ( www.tekram.com ). 4667-8 ch05.f.qc 5/15/00 1:58 PM Page 144 145 Chapter 5 ✦ Installing Windows 2000 Server Central Processing Units (CPUs) The leading CPU maker is still Intel. However, AMD and Cyrix are making their own noises in the x86 market. Contact all three manufacturers for Windows 2000 Server compatibility, or check out the HCL under CPUs. Memory As mentioned earlier, stick to DIMM slots, which are 168-pin and are much faster than SIMMs; besides, you will not find a newly manufactured motherboard for a server that comes with SIMM slots. DIMM RAM sizes start at 16MB, but it is getting harder to find modules under 64MB. Because Windows 2000 Server requires at least 64MB, there is no need to look around for smaller modules. Hard Disk Drives The biggest names in Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) are Seagate, IBM, Fujitsu, Quantum, Western Digital, Maxtor, and Hewlett Packard, in no particular order. For small or bare-bone servers, you can escape with IDE or even Enhanced IDE (EIDE) drives. Anything more— supporting multiple users or high-end applications, Terminal Services, and BackOffice or high-end role servers — demands SCSI hard disk drives. SCSI comes in several flavors: SCSI, SCSI-2, SCSI-3, and Ultra SCSI are the base proto- cols. Several years ago, it was thought that SCSI would go the way of the dodo, but it continues to surge, and new SCSI standards are emerging all the time. The advantage of SCSI over IDE or EIDE lies in several factors: ✦ Speed: SCSI drives are much faster in access time and transfer rate than IDE drives; however, new IDE drives are being introduced every month that out- perform recent additions to the SCSI lineup. ✦ Capacity: SCSI drives are currently available from 9.5GB to 72GB (although this will be out of date by the time you reach the end of the chapter, and IDE technology continues to surprise us). * Addressing: Many drives or devices can be chained on a single cable. You can currently address up to 15 SCSI devices with the Ultra SCSI standard. ✦ Support: There is more supporting technology available for SCSI that is targeted to server solutions. These include high-end RAID controllers, hot insert hardware, storage silos, and drive array enclosures. In addition to SCSI, a new standard is beginning to take hold and is showing amaz- ing promise. It is called Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop or FC-AL. FC-AL drives are connected by coax cable. The drives are incredibly fast, and you can currently address up to 126 of them, as opposed to 15 under SCSI. Table 5-2 lists the differ- ences between FC-AL and SCSI. 4667-8 ch05.f.qc 5/15/00 1:58 PM Page 145 146 Part II ✦ Planning, Installation, and Configuration Table 5-2 SCSI versus FC-AL Specification SCSI FC-AL Cable distances 1.5-3 meters 30 meters between devices Data rates 5MB per second 200MB per second Addressing 15 devices 126 devices Array support Parity Hot insert support with no special controller, dual porting, CRC for integrity In addition to the differences listed in Table 5-2, FC-AL is extremely tidy in compari- son to SCSI; the devices have a single port for a coaxial connection, and no other configuration is required. SCSI, on the other hand, requires ribbon cable, jumpers, and terminators. The downside of using FC-AL is that they are a little more expensive than SCSI drives and have not been extensively tested with Windows 2000 (nor have the large SCSI drivers, for that matter). Both standards in large capacity are worth experi- menting with; after all, hard disk prices are dropping everyday. At the current rate, a 96GB HDD is expected to cost about $300 by 2002. Hot insert or hot swap is also an important consideration for server class machines. Your servers should be configured with hot swap drive hardware that will allow you to remove a dead drive while a system is hot and online. This allows you to replace drives without bringing mission-critical servers down. Hot swap standards come in four levels, as illustrated in Table 5-3. Table 5-3 Hot Swap Levels Level Capability Level 1 Cold swap. System is offline; no power is applied to the drive. Level 2 Hot swap reset. System is held in reset state; power is applied. Level 3 Hot swap on an idle bus. Power is applied. Level 4 Hot swap on an active bus. Power is applied to the drive. 4667-8 ch05.f.qc 5/15/00 1:58 PM Page 146 [...]... install Windows 2000, as illustrated in Figure 5-1 The next screen is the Setup Wizard You are prompted to either upgrade or install a new copy of Windows 2000 Server For this exercise, choose the latter Figure 5-1: The Windows 2000 welcome and installation dialog box Note If you are making CD copies of a Windows 2000 Server installation, products like EasyCD from Adaptec can take Windows 2000 boot... be changed short of reinstalling the machine, if it is still a standalone, member, or role server If you need to change the NetBIOS name of a domain controller, you will have to reinstall Active Directory We talk about naming again in the next section Installing Windows 2000 Server We have found, after dozens of installations, that the best practice for installing Windows 2000 Server is to raise a bare-bones... boot on a production server Note You can dual boot a server to either NT 4.0 or Windows 2000, but only if the NT operating system has been upgraded to Service Pack 4 or later Service Pack 4 and later upgrade the NT NTFS to read Windows 2000 volumes NT 4.0 with SP 3 and less will not run on the new NTFS volume, and if you install Windows 2000 before adding at least SP 4 to the Windows NT side, you will... 5/15/00 1:58 PM Page 149 Chapter 5 ✦ Installing Windows 2000 Server Note According to our definition, a member server can be a role server only if you install specific role services onto the server during installation, such as WINS, DNS, DHCP, and so on Domain Controller There are two approaches to installing a domain controller First, you can raise the machine as a member server and promote it post-installation,... detecting and installing the drivers for the NICs, Windows 2000 will attempt to locate a DHCP server on the network It does this by broadcasting on DHCP Port 75 and then listening for a response from a DHCP server If Windows 2000 is not able to obtain an IP address, it will use the auto-configuration protocol and assign itself an IP address You can then continue with the installation, installing to... products have been tested compatible with Windows 2000 There is zero setup effort with any of the latest 3Com NICs, and as long as you install any of 3Com’s 900 series (such as the 3C905), you won’t have any hassle Plug and Play Plug and Play (PnP) has arrived on Windows 2000 Server This technology makes installing devices far less painful than was the case on Windows NT, which did not support PnP For... will attempt to use both The first active partition 4667-8 ch05.f.qc 5/15/00 1:58 PM Page 151 Chapter 5 ✦ Installing Windows 2000 Server will get snagged for the system files the minimum required to raise the system to a point where you can run recovery tools, or the Recovery Console Windows 2000 calls this volume — you guessed it — the system volume Note You can control how installation deals with... are discussed later in this chapter and as part of unattended installation in the Windows 2000 Resource Kit in Appendix B Windows 2000 will then snag a second drive or partition and use it for the boot files the files needed to boot the rest of the operating system all the way to the desktop where you can log in Windows 2000 calls this volume the Boot volume (This is a reversal of the old naming convention... name of host Member Servers Member servers are members of domains In order to install a member server into a domain, you’ll need several items on your checklist: ✦ Domain name ✦ An administrator’s password ✦ Network protocol ✦ IP address ✦ DNS IP addresses and host names ✦ NetBIOS name of host Role Servers Role servers do not need to be members of domains In order to install a role server into a domain,...4667-8 ch05.f.qc 5/15/00 1:58 PM Page 147 Chapter 5 ✦ Installing Windows 2000 Server Mission critical or maximum availability servers should be configured with Level 4 hot swap capability HDD Controllers The standard HDD controllers that are built onto most motherboards suffice for most server and data processing needs Small business systems configured with IDE or EIDE . next section. Installing Windows 2000 Server We have found, after dozens of installations, that the best practice for installing Windows 2000 Server is to. system called Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition (TSE). Terminal server is no longer a separate product under Windows 2000 Server. All servers come