TECHNICAL TIPS: INSTALLING WINDOWS SERVER 2012 R2

Windows Server 2012 R2 Hardware Requirements

As with previous Windows versions, your hardware must meet certain requirements for Windows Server 2012 R2 to function properly. First of all, Windows Server 2012 R2 requires a 64-bit processor; Microsoft has discontinued 32-bit software with this release of Windows Server. Table 2-2 outlines the minimum and recommended hardware requirements for Windows Server 2012 R2 as provided by Microsoft:

Component	Minimum Requirement	Microsoft Recommended
Processor	1.4 GHz	2 GHz or faster
Memory	512 MB RAM	2 GB RAM or greater
Available Disk Space	32 GB	40 GB or greater
Optical Drive	DVD-ROM drive	DVD-ROM drive
Display	Super VGA (800x600) monitor	XGA (1024x768) monitor

Installing Windows Server 2012 R2

Insert the Windows Server 2012 DVD, and once you get the following message press Enter to boot from the setup

2- Wait for a while till the setup loads all necessary files (Depending on your machine, it will take couple of minutes)

3- Once the setup files are loaded, the setup will start with the following screen. You can change these to meet your needs (the default values should be fine for now)

4- Once you click Next, you can start the installation, click “Install now”

5- You will see the following screen, wait until it finishes loading

6- In the following setup screen, you will see four options. Select Windows Server 2012 DataCenter Evaluation (Server With GUI).

7- After you click Next from previous screen, Read the License terms, tick the “I accept the license terms” and click Next

8- Now It will ask you for the drive (or partition) you want to install Windows on. Here I’m installing it on the one partition I have here. NOTE: This will remove the content of the partition. Either you create a partition to install windows on, or you can test this on a testing machine

9- Now once we picked our partition, clicking on next from previous screen will start the setup. This process might take a while.

10- Once the setup is done, it will restart and start your Windows Server 2012 for the first time. It will ask you then to set up a password for the Administrator user

11- The setup will finalize your settings, might take a couple of minutes

12- Once the setup is done, you can log in for the first time to your Windows Server, as the screen says, press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to log in, and use the password you set in the setup process