Category: Windows Server 2012

MS Security Compliance Manager 3.0 Hits the streets

One of the absolute best tools for managing security group policy settings in a Microsoft environment is their Security Compliance Manager. Hot off the presses is version 3.0, which is a major step forward in both functionality and OS/product support. The full product announcement from Microsoft is here. The most...

Create Trusted Remote Desktop Services (RDP) SSL Certificate

For Windows Server 2016/2019 and Windows 10, see my new post: Trusted Remote Desktop Services SSL Certs for Win10/2019 For Windows environments that want extra security, one of the features that has been around for ages is requiring TLS 1.0 for Windows RDP (Remote Desktop) connections. This functionality requires a...

WMI GPO Filters for Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8

When deploying Group Policies in a Windows environment, often you may have different GPOs for different versions of the operating systems. With the recent release of Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, it's likely you will have new GPOs just for these operating systems. You could build out new OUs...

Inject Cisco UCS Drivers into Windows Server 2012 ISO

A few days ago I blogged about injecting VMware vSphere drivers into a Windows Server 2012 image, so you can seamlessly install WS2012 inside a VM with PVSCSI and VMXNET hardware. Next up is injecting Cisco UCS drivers into Windows Server 2012, in case you need to install Windows Server...

HP Service Pack for ProLiant supports Windows Server 2012

Just released is the October 2012 HP Service Pack for ProLiant, which has full support for Windows Server 2012. Current support for Windows Server 2012 is focused on G7 and Gen8 servers. G6s and earlier will have limited to no WS2012 support. The 2012.10.0 release has these major changes: Added support for...

Cisco UCS now supports Windows Server 2012

If you want to run Windows Server 2012 on Cisco UCS blades, fear no more! As of the 2.0(4a) release they now have official support in firmware, and an updated drivers disc. Just login to Cisco TAC, get the firmware and new driver disc. As you can see in the...

New Cisco UCS Firmware – 2.0(4b)

Today Cisco release a new firmware bundle for their UCS servers, 2.0(4b). No major fixes in the bundle. You can find the full Release Notes here. If you want to run Windows Server 2012, 2.0(4a) is the minimum supported version you need to be running. You can check out my blog...

Inject VMware Drivers into Windows Server 2012 ISO Image

A while back I wrote a blog article on how to inject VMware drivers (PVSCSI and VMXNET3) into a Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 image. You can check out that article here. But given those are now legacy operating systems, I'm refreshing the procedures for Windows Server 2012 (they'd...

Windows Server 2012 File Share Deduplication in action!

A great new feature in Windows Server 2012 is data deduplication. Data deduplication uses sub-file variable-size chunking and compression, which together deliver optimization ratios of 2:1 for general file servers and up to 20:1 for Hyper-V virtualization data. Microsoft has some great articles on dedupe, such as this one and a...