Step by Step Guide to Install Active Directory on Windows Server 2008 Core

Windows 2008 core its great creation of Microsoft. It's basically a light version of windows 2008 and comes without all the GUI stuff. There are tools that you can install in core installation and get the GUI. In here I'm going to demonstrate how to setup domain control using Command prompt.

Requirement :

Minimum: 1 GHz (x86 processor) or 1.4 GHz (x64 processor)

Minimum: 512 MB RAM

Minimum (32-bit systems): 20 GB or greater

Minimum (64-bit systems): 32 GB or greater

• First option is to assign a dedicated ip to the server.

At command prompt type

netsh interface ipv4 show interfaces

This will show all the network interfaces that available in the server. Please keep note on idx number of the interface that you need to assign the ip in our case its 10

netsh interface ipv4 set address name="10" source=static address=10.0.0.15 mask=255.255.255.0 gateway=10.0.0.1

in here I wanted to apply ip address 10.0.0.15 to the interface. Here you can see after the command the server got the new ip address

Next step was to assign DNS server ip 10.0.0.15

netsh interface ipv4 add dnsserver name="10" address=10.0.0.15 index=1

• Now its ready for the DC install. Now we need to create unattend answer file for the domain install

notepad unattend.txt

then you need to type the file with the requirement

[DCINSTALL]

UserName=administrator

NewDomain=forest

NewDomainDNSName=rebeladmin.com

Password=Pa$$w0rd

SiteName=Default-First-Site-Name

ReplicaOrNewDomain=domain

DatabasePath="%systemroot%'NTDS"

LogPath="%systemroot%'NTDS"

SYSVOLPath="%systemroot%'SYSVOL"

InstallDNS=yes

ConfirmGC=yes

SafeModeAdminPassword=Pa$$w0rd

RebootOnCompletion=yes

In here this will install domain rebeladmin.com with DNS

Now we ready for the install. You can execute it from

dcpromo /answer:c:\unattend.txt

it will take some time to install and after install it will automatically restart. After restart its done. Now you have DC with Server 2008 core.

If you have nay question feel free to ask me on rebeladmin@live.com