Implementing Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Essentials on HP ProLiant servers

2
Introduction
This integration note describes the requirements for running Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Essentials on HP ProLiant
servers and provides guidance for installing the OS on ProLiant servers.
Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Essentials is the latest version of Windows Server 2012 Small Business Server (SBS)
Essentials. It protects your business data without limiting your access to it. You can access your centrally located data
and applications by connecting to the cloud services from virtually anywhere using almost any device.
This paper contains the list of ProLiant servers and options from which you can choose when running
Windows Server 2012 Essentials.
This paper addresses several key topics:
• Recommended system configurations
• Recommended ProLiant servers
• Recommended ProLiant server platform options, including:
– Software and drivers
– Storage options
– NICs
• Procedures for a new installation
• Known issues and workarounds
Windows Server 2012 Essentials overview
Windows Server 2012 Essentials is a server solution for small businesses with up to 25 users and 50 devices. It
incorporates the latest Microsoft technologies for management, networking, data storage and backup, security, and
document and printer sharing. You can protect, centralize, organize, and access applications and information from
almost anywhere using virtually any device.
Windows Server 2012 offers several new features. You can use the following features with the ProLiant servers listed in
the “Recommended ProLiant servers” section:
• Consistent Device Naming (CDN): Uses firmware-supplied NIC names for easier identification of each NIC and server.
To use the CDN feature, you must us a ProLiant Gen8 server with one of the following Flexible LAN on motherboard
(LOM) NICs:
– HP Ethernet 1 Gb 4-Port 331FLR Adapter (for select ProLiant ML/DL/SL servers)
– HP Ethernet 10 Gb 2-Port 530FLR SFP+ Adapter (for select ProLiant ML/DL/SL servers)
• Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) V2: Provides an operating system interface through which
instrumented components provide information and notification.
• Network Driver Interface Specification 6.30 (NDIS 6.30): Incorporates the following NDIS enhancements into
Windows Server 2012:
– Virtualized networking enhancements
– Power management enhancements
– Quality of service support
– Windows filtering platform enhancements
– Scalable networking enhancements
Storage Spaces is a new technology in Windows Server 2012 Essentials that facilitates aggregation of different types of
storage into highly available volumes. Storage Spaces does not currently support smart array controllers. HP has
elected not to support Storage Spaces at this time. We will continue to drive joint innovation with Microsoft in the
storage resource management area. If you wish to create high performance, highly available pools of internal or mixed
internal and external storage should continue to use HP Smart Array and SAN storage products for this purpose.