My first attempt with Windows Server 2012

I was able to get a license for Windows Server 2012 from Website Park. So I tried it on my home server. The installation was fairly quick. I was never a fan of the Metro UI but I had to surpass my dislikes if I wanted to try the new server OS. With SSD and 8GB of ram, the OS was very responsive. The look and feel is more elegant compared to Windows Server 2008. It even recognized my Adaptec 6805 raid card during the installation – odd that Server 2008 didn’t.

So far the dashboard window is very helpful. It’s a window that has links to many of the common settings and configurations. I’ve also noticed that I didn’t have to install additional software from Intel so that my NIC cards can be teamed. Windows has a built-in teaming interface now. It even allows me to use a different brand of NIC (onboard NIC is a Realtek) along with my 2x Intel NICs – but I won’t. The task manager is more detailed as well. That’s all that I’ve noticed so far because I ran into a problem afterwards.

I started to install some drivers for components (USB3.0, Intel stuff, etc) though I didn’t need to based on the device manager recognizing everything. Then I enabled Hyper-V. This required a restart. Well this is what I saw after the restart.

I never got in anymore. I’m not sure if the drivers I used to install for the components did this or if it was enabling Hyper-V. I was able to get in safe mode. I tried to uninstall the newly installed drivers/software for the components and disable Hyper-V but it wouldn’t let me. I don’t know too much about Windows since I’ve been using Apple for some time now and it was getting late, so I gave up and put Windows Server 2008 again. I will be trying again soon and hope to figure out what had happened. There are some features I’ve been wanting to try like storage pool, ReFS, Hyper-V and trim support, and supposedly overall management is more efficient and easier – we’ll see.