Installing Active Directory Domain Services In Windows Server 8 Developer Preview…

In case anyone has missed, Microsoft released the Developer Preview build of Windows 8 client and server. I tried installing AD on Windows 8 server. There are few useful options that has been exposed as part of the AD installation. Below is a walkthrough of the steps required.

Installation procedure is pretty much the same as Server 2008 R2. You select “Active Directory Domain Services” role in Server Manager. Selecting ADDS role adds the remote server admin tools and AD module for Windows PowerShell, which is new in this version.

.Net 4.5 is installed as part of the base OS installation.

Couple of new options are exposed in the next page of the wizard. You can export the configuration settings to an xml file for reuse.

You can specify an alternate source path, so that the installation can pick up the necessary files required.

Click on the “Promote this server to a domain controller” link to start dcpromo. You can export the settings from this page as well.

Choose the deployment option.

Select the functional levels and DSRM password. The functional levels available are 2003, 2008, 2008 R2 and Server 8.

Specify the database folder locations. The SYSVOL location is specified in the same page as well.

Review the summary and click install. A new option exposed is the “View Script” button.

Clicking the button shows the PowerShell script that the system will run.

Prerequisites for the installation are checked.

System goes through the steps of promoting the server to be a domain controller and the server gets restarted at the end.