Welcome to the ITFreeTraining video on Windows Server 2012 install requirements. This video
will look at minimum requirements to install Windows Server 2012 and also look at some
recommended requirements to get optional performance out of your Windows Server 2012 installation.
In order to install Widows Server 2012 you need to meet the following hardware requirements.
You require 1.4 GHz 64bit processor, 512 Megabytes of RAM and 32 Gigabytes of available hard
disk space. These requirements are very low and are enough
to install Windows Server 2012 and not much else. It should be pointed out that Microsoft
refers to these requirements as install requirements rather than minimum requirements as they did
in previous operating systems and these are effectively what they are. The requirements
will allow you to install Windows Server 2012 but if you start adding roles or additional
applications the performance of the server will quickly reduce.
If you attempt to install Windows Server 2012 on a computer that does not meet these requirements
the install may fail and if it does succeed you will not have the best user experience
using Windows Server 2012 even for basic operations. It should also be pointed out that if you
attempt to install Windows Server 2012 Essentials it will not install without a working network
card. The network card must not only be present, Windows must also have drivers for it. If
Windows does not have drivers you can supply your own, but if Windows Essentials cannot
detect and install a network card the install will stop and you will not be able to continue
until you supply these drivers or install a working network card.
When this video was created, Microsoft had not released recommend hardware requirements
for Windows Server 2012 except for the essential edition of Windows Server 2012. For the essential
edition, as shown the requirements are much the same for CPU. For the Ram this jumps to
2 Gigabytes. During our testing of Windows Server 2012, 2 Gigabytes seems like a good
starting point for Ram to use basic features in Windows Server 2012 and allows adding some
roles like Active Directory. In our testing of systems with 1 Gigabyte, this was not enough
RAM when you start adding some roles to the server and start putting the server under
some load. It ultimately depends on what you will use the server for to determine how much
Ram that you will need. For the Essential edition, Microsoft recommended
160 Gigabytes of hard disk and, if possible, 60 Gigabytes of that used for the system partitions.
In other words, a 60 Gigabytes partition just for the operating system. You can see that
the install requirements will get Windows Server 2012 up and running, but in the real
world you will want more than this if you want to do anything other than install Windows
Server 2012. Microsoft also gives some optional requirements.
Although none of these are required to install Windows Server 2012, Microsoft suggests that
it is a good idea to meet these requirements in order to get the performance out of
Windows Server 2012. First they recommend a DVD drive. The Windows
Server 2012 media is available on DVD, however can also be installed from other media
like using a USB drive. For this reason, you may be able to use Windows Server 2012 quite
effectively without having to ever use the DVD drive, not even during the install.
The next requirement is a Super VGA or higher monitor. This essentially means a monitor
that can support 800 by 600 or higher. In the case of servers, and particularly if your
company has a lot of servers, most of the administration nowadays will be performed
from remote so in a lot of cases the administrator may rarely visit the server and use it physically.
The monitor may only be required for the initial install and configuration.
The next requirement is a keyboard and mouse. Once again, nowadays it is possible to perform
all administration from remote. In some cases the administrator may only use the keyboard
and mouse during install time. If you do decide to do this, ensure that your bios is configured
to continue booting without a keyboard. Many Bios's will generate an error on boot and
pause if no keyboard is connected to the computer. To ensure your computer will always boot,
make sure the bios is configured to continue the boot process without a keyboard.
The last requirement is internet access. In some cases your server may be on a secure
network and not have a direct connection to the internet. Windows Server 2012 will still
work without internet access, however some features require internet access, for example
to download updates. In a lot of cases, there are workarounds which you can use to get around
not having direct internet access for the server.
Well this covers the basic requirements for Windows Server 2012. You can see that the
requirements are quite low and with the price of hardware nowadays, you will be able to
purchase a server quite easily that will exceed these requirements.
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