Fun with Windows Server 8 Beta

"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that"


I support, along with the usual Microsoft server products, at work Symantec Enterprise Vault.  Recently Windows Server 8 beta was released.  I had mentioned this in a previous post, but now it was time to try it for real.

I created a VMWare Workstation virtual machine and spun up an image.  Then just because I can (you know that guy thing where we just do stuff to see if we can) I decided to see if the latest and greatest version of Enterprise Vault, Version 10, would even look at installing on this new car smell operating system.

At first signs it was promising :

Even this new OS did not phase the installer, and we are good to go, right?

Well not quite, it failed the .Net framework test, yes Windows Server 8 Beta comes with the .Net Framework version 4.5 but this is no go, good old Enterprise Vault needs version 3.5.

No problem I thought to myself we will just add this "feature" via the Server Manager :

Great this is looking promising :

Excellent we can add the required framework, everything looks good so far.

Then in the words of Homer Jay Simpson. "D'oh".

And we were going so well there, at least Server 8 gives you a nice Web 2.0 "flag" to show you where it all went wrong.

Yeah pretty, but not too helpful.  Aha I thought, I will just do what we do on other Microsoft operating systems.  I then proceeded to download the offline installation of the required .Net Framework.

As we have always done, a simple double click and a follow of the white rabbit, I mean wizard would have this installed lickety-split.  But no it has all changed, hence the title "Fun with Windows Server 8 Beta". Upon that innocent double click we get :

Odd, I did not choose "Windows Features" all I did was double click an installer that well, just installs on all other Microsoft operating systems.  Just to rub it in we then get :

So it's my way or the highway, you must use Server Manager.  Well good to know.  A little digging around on the web revealed that the actual cause of the install failure is due to lack of connectivity to the Internet.  Now the virtual machine is NATed to the host, so that should be OK there, but a quick check of the TCP/IP v4 settings showed :

Yes I could have set the IP settings to static, but this is just a play around server, and I am just seeing if Enterprise Vault would even install.  All that is needed is to add a secondary DNS, and Google DNS will do as well as any, then a quick trip back to Server Manager and vuala as they say :

Now all I need to get sorted is the ASP.NET 2.0 requirement and i should have it all installed. Fun and games indeed.