I’ve installed a beta of Windows Server 2008 on a new partition that I carved out on my secondary workstation. Installation went fairly smoothly, but both my sound card and the onboard Intel graphics chipset are not supported, so I’m stuck with the generic VGA driver which, frankly, looks like hell. Still, since most server management will take place remotely, this shouldn’t be a show stopper.

The install creates a dual-boot menu at startup, which allows me to choose betweein Win 2008 or a “legacy windows system”…that is, my existing Windows XP workstation.

The beta is good until April 2008. After about 20 minutes, everything is copied to the hard drive, and you can start playing.

A major advantage of 2008 is that the wizards previously available on small business server have been added to 2008 to provide “accidental network managers” some additional support.

I quickly changed the default IP address obtained from the DHCP server on my router to a fixed IP4 address. I also nailed down the admin password.

Right out of the box the server doesn’t do a thing; you have to assign “roles” from the extensive list provided:

• Active Directory (several items)
• Application Server
• DHCP server
• DNS server (and is this required for AD as in previous versions?)
• Fax server (the application that apparently will never die)
• File Services (our first role)
• Network Policy and Access services (functionality provided by the previous add-on application, including VPN services and fewalling)
• Print Services (shared printers)
• Terminal Services
• IIS
• SharePoint
• Windows Deployement Services

Picking one of the roles above then allows you to pick additional functionality related to the main role.

Roles that require other roles as a prerequisite will automatically let you know.For example you can’t install Sharepoint without installing IIS and the Net Framework 3.0. Makes sense, of course.

For starters, I’ve installed print services and file services. Once the installation is complete, I received a message saying I had to restart the server.