Exploring Nano Server for Windows Server 2016

coming up nano server the new headless deployment option for Windows Server 2016 we take a look at how it gives you the lightest and fastest option with significantly fewer patches and reboots customizing nano server for your next generation apps and your management options so I'm joined by a man that needs no introduction Jeffrey's Nova the architects of nano server welcome yeah it's great to be back here on the mechanics so what is nano server and what are we solving for here yeah the cloud is really transforming the way we develop applications to be more distributed componentized and run as micro services as a result everything needs to be smaller lighter faster weight and consume fewer resources to illustrate compare nano server with the full desktop experience here is server with the desktop this has all the components the graphical user interface this is the best option for small to medium businesses or for remote desktop experience but what if you don't need the desktop that's what server core is about server core what we've done is we've removed the window shell Internet Explorer local GUI management these are the components that consume a lot of resources and are responsible for a number of updates and thus reboots but what if you wanted to go and have a fully custom environment where you have just the components your application needs and nothing else that's where nano server comes in so with nano server we've removed 32 bit support we've removed the graphics stack we've removed the windows the remote desktop and win log on so you have the bare minimal components and we've also been mindful of maintaining the critical api's while optimizing nano server to be literally 25 times smaller than server with the desktop that said well you have tiny footprint in terms of size you can still install packages your application needs from various repositories so you can add these packages either from a local path a UNC path a local directory or from the cloud so to make this real for everyone there's a lot of people out there who are still using server with the desktop experience yes how does that compare with nano server ok well let's take a look so here I've got a server with the desktop experience and PowerShell PowerShell ISE and so let me just show you how many processes are running so what I'll do is I will select this and what I'll show you is the processes running and then a string that says how many so we got 54 processes running now this machine I've got hypervisor so that adds another four and then I've got PowerShell ISE so basically you've got about 50 processes running with nothing else running on server core ok all right that's on server with the desktop experience now let's go to nano server so I'll connect to nano server now haven't connected in I'll run exactly the same command and notice there were only 20 Wow so in the passive server with the desktop there are 50 here there were only 20 that's awesome that's a significant reduction and but it's still giving giving you the functionality you need exactly and that translates into startup times and to reboot times this is a peppy thing nice so not a server by default can run things like asp.net nodejs it's it's fully manageable but what if what if I want to customize it how do I go about doing that now you can customize by creating an image using PowerShell or desired state configuration for instance imagine one nano server to perform as a hyper-v hosts you'd add the compute package if you wanted it to serve up web applications you'd add the iis package later you can customize an existing nano server image by adding additional packages either from local repositories or from the cloud so can we take a look yeah absolutely so here what I've done is again I'm on server with the desktop what I'll do is I will import this PowerShell module this comes with Windows Server 2016 media and then what I'll do is I'll create the image nano server image and then I'll create a VM with that VHD and then start it okay so we'll get that running now while that's running let me explain what this did this is new nano server image any guesses what that does is beyond me yeah it's a great thing about PowerShell you just read it right so new nano server image media path D that's where you get the media where's the target well okay you wanted here this is where you want the VHD to go go then we want to install guest drivers so vm's you put guest drivers physical devices you add om drivers okay we'll give it a computer name man a server demo and then here's where we pick the packages that we want so here what I'm going to do is I'm going to add the nano server IAS package if we want to add hypervisor we could add - compute etc so that's what's going on okay so now that's finished so what I'll do is I'll now connect to that nano server VM and again when we did was we created the bare minimal stuff there right so now the question is I'd like to add some more stuff how do you get that well you get the thing is that in the in the cloud there are lots of different communities there's PowerShell communities there's developer communities the developer communities have their own communities so how do you have a single common experience to get them all the answer is fine package provider so here what we're doing is we're going out to the web to find package providers for the various different cloud-based repositories and you see here's one for new get asked us to download that that's the basis for all of our stuff is new get so we install that get the latest version and then you see just provider so you can get content from gist from github from containers this is how we'll get containers so imagine I want to get some stuff from Mooga and I'm a developer I don't wanted to go get some stuff so I'll go find out what packages are available from new get and take a look at that it's a few there's a few in fact I'm gonna have to stop this demo cuz otherwise this would just keep going on and on and on okay so these are all from the community these are all from the community exactly there's just a ton of them everything you can want is there so let me just take one Letson segment imagine you wanted to experiment with nodejs well how would you do that how'd you do that in the past right go to a search engine type note j yes find a gazillion legs try to find the right link click on that link read some documentation decide where the download it's at the right black so here you what do you do you say I'd like to install a package called nodejs and that's what you do it's almost too simple okay so stalling that ask you are you sure you want to do that we say yes I'm sure I want to do that and we're installing the node.js package we just found it in the cloud and got it so now I'll CD to that okay I'll do a directory there's no js' now I'll create a little node.js file and I'll run it so no js' hello Jas HelloWorld nano server in PowerShell rocks so it's as simple as that you had nano server didn't have what you want is out there in the cloud somewhere you found the package provider to bring it to you and you just use it that's awesome and so straight straightforward streamlined approach yeah that's what we're trying to get to is this model where you think what you want you type it and you get it also so what are some of the other benefits to this lightweight approach yeah let's take a look at the details so comparing current builds to Windows Server we've seen over 90 percent fewer critical updates a quarter of the number of reboots significantly smaller attack surface here you can see super fast super fast set up times I mean 40 seconds yeah vs. 19 minutes let me just let that sink in 40 seconds versus 19 minutes and it's over 25 times smaller nice it's crazy so it's small yeah but what are some of the what are some of the cool scenarios that make most sense finatus okay so we see nano server as the future of the data center . this is your future now initially we're focused in on two scenarios scenario number one cloud private cloud infrastructure so that's clustered hypervisor clustered storage and some critical network roles next is as a cloud application platform so here this is for building the best applications small lightweight using containers micro services right and mount Russinovich recently demoed notice of a mark mark mark and the hyper-v container on our containers show yeah so let me show you how this works okay so here what I've done is I've created a connection to the VM that we just created the nano server VM okay and so now what I'm going to show you is a new feature of PowerShell that allows me to do remote file transfer over PowerShell remoting so you've never had that before so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna copy an asp.net application another place yeah exactly so I went and copied that I did that and that's on the local session and then I'm copying it into the VM over PowerShell remoting so you know what this is gonna take a while let me interrupt that and show you do it Julia Child and show you an existing system okay so here is one that we already set up so I'll connect to it and what I've done is because I installed iis and that before I've got the IAS PowerShell functions so I'll go ahead and import that those commandlets I create a new IAS site and I guess is what that does I can imagine it creates a new ISI oh you are good what is good about it okay and now we'll get the IP address here and now what we'll do is we'll copy that come here to this now we'll connect to that we created a website of our asp.net application running on course ELR and we are listening on port 8000 and voila there's our asp.net Evan again and as simple as that a little bit more graphical than though no js' example indeed it's much better you know and again the nice thing about the new asp.net model is it just xcopy deployment so what are some of the trade-offs with nano server for example no anis I support no graphical stack your remote desktop yeah so we don't really view those as trade-offs so let's take 64-bit support you know we've had 64-bit support for a long time so most of your applications are already there or really should be looking for alternatives in terms of graphical management most of the graphical management tools that you have will work against nano server but they'll work remotely and that's the way you should do it run the GUI tool here and then managed remotely and this is all possible because we manage everything through WMI PowerShell and desired state configuration and this enables a wide ecosystem of tool like chef pappad visual studio deployment and of course we have the system eight center agents that work on it as well so can you show us some examples of how we manage nano server and in particular what would happen if we were disconnected from nano server over the network oh yeah great question so basically everyone knows about the PowerShell management we showed a little bit about that but we also have a simplified UI that gives you local interface we call the nano server recovery console so here let me connect to that so here we're connected gives you information about the nano server and then down here at the bottom you can manage the networking or the firewall so connect to the networking pick the one NIC that we have and here you see the details of that NIC you can manage the IP settings the gateway etc and here we're even showing the driver information so you can enable and disable this but we also have remote management remote GUI management as I mentioned that traditional tools will continue to work with nano server but now we have a new one this is an azure based remote server management tool ok so here let's connect to the azure portal and this is connected to a nano server machine so this is in Azure connected to a nano server machine running in our data center ok so here it shows you all the details of the machine we've got some monitoring CPU memory network here we'll go to all settings and you see all the tools available to you identification local admin IP addresses look here you even have the registry editor okay you can manage the registry as well as the device manager all from a web browser running in Azure great stuff this looks like an excellent option for those wanting to embrace a more modern microservices architecture with just the roles and features you need yeah how do you get started yeah it's easy just go and download the technical preview and keep watching Microsoft Mechanics to keep apprised at the latest updates thanks for watching bye for now you

Channel: BT Shop

Views: 12,831

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: windows server 2016

Id: Sjg5WZVDQiU

Length: 13min 47sec (827 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 18 2016