Tag: install

Oct152019October 15, 2019October 14, 20190 Commentby Thomas Maurer

Deploy and Configure Windows Admin Center in Azure VM

Deploy and Install Windows Admin Center in an Azure VM

Posted in Cloud, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, PowerShell, Windows Admin Center, Windows Server, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019

The great thing about Windows Admin Center (WAC) you manage every Windows Server doesn’t matter where it is running. You can manage Windows Servers on-prem, in Azure or running at other cloud providers. Now if you want to use Windows Admin Center to manage your virtual machines running in Azure, you can use either an on-prem WAC installation and connecting it using a public IP address or a VPN connection, or you can deploy and install Windows Admin Center in Azure. This blog post will show you how you can deploy and install Windows Admin Center in an Azure virtual machine (VM).

How to deploy and install Windows Admin Center in an Azure virtual machine (VM)

With this guide, you can directly deploy and install a new Windows Admin Center gateway in an Azure VM. If you have already a VM deployed, you can also follow this guide to install Windows Admin Center manually. For the installation, we will use Azure Cloud Shell do run a PowerShell installation script.

Preparation

As mentioned we will run the installation script from Azure Cloud Shell. Optionally you can also install Azure PowerShell on your location machine and run the same steps for the installation on your local machine.

Set up Azure Cloud Shell if you haven’t done it yet.
Start the PowerShell experience in Cloud Shell.
Optional: If you want to use your own existing certificate, upload the certificate to Azure Key Vault.

Installation

Now you can start with the installation process. First, you will need to download the installation script from the following URL. Navigate to your home directory and download the file using PowerShell.

Download Windows Admin Center with PowerShell in Cloud Shell

# Navigate to your home directory
cd ~
 
# Download file
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://aka.ms/deploy-wacazvm -OutFile Deploy-WACAzVM.zip
 
# Expand Zip file
Expand-Archive ./Deploy-WACAzVM.zip
 
# Change Directory
cd Deploy-WACAzVM

After successfully downloading and unpacking the Windows Admin Center deployment script, you will need to modify a couple of parameters. I will use the default parameters to deploy a new Windows Server 2019 and generate a self-signed certificate. However, if you want to use other options, check out the script parameter list.

Configure Parameter

$ResourceGroupName = "demo-wac-rg"
$VirtualNetworkName = "wac-vnet"
$SecurityGroupName = "wac-nsg"
$SubnetName = "wac-subnet"
$VaultName = "wac-key-vault"
$CertName = "wac-cert"
$Location = "westeurope"
$PublicIpAddressName = "wac-public-ip"
$Size = "Standard_D4s_v3"
$Image = "Win2019Datacenter"
$Credential = Get-Credential
 
$scriptParams = @{
ResourceGroupName = $ResourceGroupName
Name = "wac-vm1"
Credential = $Credential
VirtualNetworkName = $VirtualNetworkName
SubnetName = $SubnetName
Location = $Location
Size = $Size
Image = $Image
GenerateSslCert = $true
}
./Deploy-WACAzVM.ps1 @scriptParams

This will deploy a new Azure virtual machine with Windows Admin Center installed and open the specific port 443 on the public IP address. You can find more install options and parameters to install WAC on an existing virtual machine or with an existing certificate on Microsoft Docs.

Deploy and Configure Windows Admin Center in Azure VM

After the deployment has finished, simply click on the URL or IP address and it will open the Windows Admin Center portal.

Windows Admin Center Running in Microsoft Azure

I hope this gives you an overview about how you can deploy Windows Admin Center in an Azure VM. If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments.

Aug272019August 27, 2019November 10, 20192 Commentsby Thomas Maurer

Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 WSL2 on Windows Server

How to Install WSL 2 on Windows Server

Posted in Hyper-V, Microsoft, Virtualization, Windows, Windows 10, Windows Server

A couple of months ago Microsoft announced the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2), which is a successor of the Windows Subsystem for Linux shipped a couple of years ago. WSL 2 is currently available for Windows Insiders running Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 18917 or higher and with the Docker Tech Preview, you can now even run Docker Linux Container directly on WSL 2. With the latest Windows Server Insider Preview build 18945, you are also able to run WSL 2 on Windows Server. In this blog post, I am going to show you how you can install the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2) on Windows Server. The Windows Subsystem for Linux was already available in earlier versions of Windows Server; however, WSL 2 brings a lot of new advantages.

The Windows Subsystem for Linux was in Windows 10 for a while now and allowed you to use different versions of Linux on your Windows 10 machine. With WSL 2, the architecture will change drastically and will bring increased file system performance and full system call compatibility. WSL 2 is now using virtualization technology (based on Hyper-V) and uses a lightweight utility VM on a real Linux kernel. You can find out more about WSL 2 in the release blog or on the Microsoft Docs Page for WSL 2.

Install Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2) on Windows Server

Here is how you can install WSL 2 on Windows Server.

Prerequisites:

Windows Server Insider Preview build 18945 or higher
A machine that supports Hyper-V Virtualization.
If you are installing your Windows Server in a virtual machine, make sure Nested Virtualization is enabled.

After you have installed a new Windows Server with the Windows Server Preview build, you will need to add the following features:

Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux
VirtualMachinePlatform

To enable these features, run the following command:

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux
 
Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName VirtualMachinePlatform

These commands will need a restart to complete.

Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) on Windows Server

Now you can install your Linux distribution which is available in WSL. You can also find the links to the Linux distro packages here: WSL distro packages. In my case, I am going to use Ubuntu 18.04, which is currently working with WSL 2.

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://aka.ms/wsl-ubuntu-1804 -OutFile ~/Ubuntu1804.zip -UseBasicParsing
md C:\Distros\Ubuntu1804
Expand-Archive ~/Ubuntu1804.zip C:\Distros\Ubuntu1894

Before you start and configure your WSL distro, I recommend that you set the WSL default version to 2. This will make the setup of your distro much faster.

wsl --set-default-version 2

Now you can start ubuntu.exe to run WSL.

C:\Distros\Ubuntu1894\ubuntu1804.exe

I hope this gives you a step-by-step guide on how you can install WSL 2 on Windows Server. Remember this is currently in preview, and not for production use. If you want to install the Windows Subsystem for Linux on Windows Server 2019, check out this blog post: Install Windows Subsystem for Linux on Windows Server.

Jul302019July 30, 2019July 30, 20190 Commentby Thomas Maurer

How to Install Azure CLI on Windows (one-liner)

Posted in Cloud, Containers, Docker, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, PowerShell, Virtualization, Windows, Windows 10, Windows Server, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019

There are many ways you can manage Azure, for example, by using the Azure PowerShell, Cloud Shell, or many other tools. One of them is the Azure CLI, which is a command-line tool providing a management experience for Azure resources. In this blog post, I will show you how you can download, install, and update the Azure CLI on Windows with a simple PowerShell one-liner.

Installation

First, if you want to install the CLI, on Windows, Linux or other platforms, we have some excellent documentation on this on Microsoft Docs.

Install Azure CLI on Windows using a PowerShell One-liner

Install Azure CLI on Windows using PowerShell

Instead of downloading the MSI file manually and install it on your Windows 10 machine, you can run the following PowerShell one-liner to install the Azure CLI. Start PowerShell as administrator and run the following command:

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://aka.ms/installazurecliwindows -OutFile .\AzureCLI.msi; Start-Process msiexec.exe -Wait -ArgumentList '/I AzureCLI.msi /quiet'

This will download and install the latest version of the Azure CLI for Windows. If you already have a version installed, it will update the existing version. Reopen PowerShell or the command prompt to start using it, and just type:

az

If you are running behind a proxy, make sure you configure your proxy settings.

Run Azure CLI on Windows using a Docker Container

Run Azure CLI Docker Container on Windows 10

If you have Docker installed, you can also run the CLI in an isolated environment using the mcr.microsoft.com/azure-cli container image and run the following command:

docker run -it mcr.microsoft.com/azure-cli

You can also use the container image as a base for your custom container image. Little fun fact, the container image is based on Linux, and with Linux containers on Windows, it runs great on Windows 10. You can find more information about running the CLI in a Docker container, on Microsoft Docs.

Configuration

After the CLI is installed, you can also configure some default settings.

az configure

One of the settings which I really like to change is the default output from JSON to table. However, you can configure it the way you like it.

az configure

To manage your Azure resources you now need to log in using the login command.

az login

az login

After the login, you will run the commands in the context of the specific user, and start working with your Azure resources.

Azure PowerShell vs. Azure CLI

I often get asked by customers, which one should they use. The short answer is: it depends. I am a long-time PowerShell user, so PowerShell is more natural to me when it comes to scripting. But if someone is using different CLIs in the past, he might prefer the CLI experience. I personally love that PowerShell gives me objects and especially in scripts, this makes things much easier for me. However, when it commands to do something in a one-liner quickly, the Azure CLI experience often works better for me. So it really depends on what you prefer, Microsoft gives you a choice to use whatever works best for you. Yes, not all services are indeed available in both of them. Especially when the service is in preview, it can happen that you only have one of them available. However, the teams are working hard to bring services to both experiences.

By the way, you can always run the latest version in the Azure Cloud Shell. And you can see this runs great if in the newest preview of the new Windows Terminal.

I hope this helps you installing the Azure CLI on Windows if you have any questions feel free to leave a comment.

Jul172019July 17, 2019July 17, 201911 Commentsby Thomas Maurer

How to Install Hyper-V Server 2019

Posted in Hyper-V, Microsoft, PowerShell, Virtualization, Windows, Windows Server, Windows Server 2019

A couple of weeks ago Microsoft released the installation media, and you can download Hyper-V Server 2019 right now. In this blog post, I am going to show you how to install and configure Hyper-V Server 2019 step by step. This should especially help beginners with Hyper-V Server 2019. Hyper-V Server 2019 ships only a core option, so there won’t be desktop experience version of Hyper-V Server like you would have with Windows Server 2019.

Hyper-V Server 2019 Requirements

Hyper-V has specific hardware requirements to run virtualization in a secure and performant way.

64-bit processor with second-level address translation (SLAT)
Minimum of 4GB of RAM. You will need more RAM for virtual machines on the Hyper-V Server.
Virtualization features and support needs to be enabled in BIOS or UEFI
- Hardware-assisted virtualization – Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel VT) or AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) technology.
- Hardware-enforced Data Execution Prevention (DEP) Intel XD bit (execute disable bit) or AMD NX bit (no execute bit).

Specific features, like Discrete device assignment (DDA) or Shielded Virtual Machines, will also have other hardware requirements. You can find more about the Hyper-V Server 2019 requirements on Microsoft Docs.

Download ISO

You can download Hyper-V Server directly from the Microsoft evaluation center. This SKU does not require a license key, and it also doesn’t expire. It is a fully supported version of Hyper-V for free. However, if you run workloads like Windows Server, Windows 10, or other operating systems on top of it, they need to be correctly licensed.

Install Hyper-V Server 2019

After you have download the ISO file, you will need to install this on your machine. There are multiple options to do this:

Burn a DVD drive and boot your server from DVD
Attach the file using an out of bound management solutions like HPE ILO or others
Create a USB drive to install Windows Server 2019
Use Windows Deployment Services
or other solutions

You can also follow this guide to add drivers to a Windows Server Image; this also works for Hyper-V Server.

Now you can boot your server with the Hyper-V installation media. This will start the step by step installation. Select the language and region settings you want to use for your Hyper-V Server.

Install Hyper-V Server 2019

Jul102019July 10, 2019July 10, 20195 Commentsby Thomas Maurer

How to Install and Update PowerShell 7

Posted in Microsoft, PowerShell, Software, Windows, Windows 10, Windows Server, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019, Work

Currently, you can install the cross-platform version PowerShell Core 6 on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Early April the PowerShell team announced the next release called PowerShell 7. PowerShell 7 is built on .NET Core 3 and brings back many APIs required by modules built on .NET Framework so that they work with .NET Core runtime. While PowerShell Core 6 was focusing on bringing cross-platform compatibility, PowerShell 7 will focus on making it a viable replacement for Windows PowerShell 5.1 and bringing near parity with Windows PowerShell. Here is how you can install and update PowerShell 7 (preview) on Windows and Linux using a simple one-liner.

If you want to know more about the roadmap, check out Steves blog post.

One great example of how cross-platform PowerShell can work, check out my blog post: How to set up PowerShell SSH Remoting.

Install PowerShell 7 (Preview)

As mentioned PowerShell 7 is currently in preview. You can download and install it manually from GitHub. However, the easiest way to install it is to use the following one-liners created by Steve Lee (Microsoft Principal Software Engineer Manager in the PowerShell Team). You can also use the same one-liners with different parameters to install the current GA version of PowerShell 6.

If you are installing the PowerShell 7 Preview, this will be a side by side installation with PowerShell 6. You can use the pwsh-preview command to run version 7.

One-liner to install or update PowerShell 7 on Windows 10

You can use this single command in Windows PowerShell to install PowerShell 7. The difference between the installation of version 6 versus version 7 is the -Preview flag.

iex "& { $(irm https://aka.ms/install-powershell.ps1) } -UseMSI -Preview"

There are additional switches to, for example, install daily builds of the latest PowerShell previews.

-Destination
The destination path to install PowerShell Core to.

-Daily
Install PowerShell Core from the daily build.
Note that the ‘PackageManagement’ module is required to install a daily package.

-Preview
Install the latest preview, which is currently version 7. This will

-UseMSI
Use the MSI installer.

-Quiet
The quiet command for the MSI installer.

-DoNotOverwrite
Do not overwrite the destination folder if it already exists.

-AddToPath
On Windows, add the absolute destination path to the ‘User’ scope environment variable ‘Path’;
On Linux, make the symlink ‘/usr/bin/pwsh’ points to “$Destination/pwsh”;
On MacOS, make the symlink ‘/usr/local/bin/pwsh’ points to “$Destination/pwsh”.

One-liner to install or update PowerShell 7 on Linux

You can use this as a single command to install PowerShell 7 on Linux

wget https://aka.ms/install-powershell.sh; sudo bash install-powershell.sh -preview; rm install-powershell.sh

Depending on your distro you are using, this will register Microsoft’s pkg repos and install that package (deb or rpm).

You can also use the following switches:

-includeide
Installs VSCode and VSCode PowerShell extension (only relevant to machines with a desktop environment)

-interactivetesting
Do a quick launch test of VSCode (only applicable when used with -includeide)

-skip-sudo-check
Use sudo without verifying its availability (hard to accurately do on some distros)

-preview
Installs the latest preview release of PowerShell side-by-side with any existing production releases

To currently run the PowerShell Preview, you can run the following command:

pwsh-preview

After Installing

After you have installed PowerShell 7, also make sure to update PowerShellGet and the PackageManagement module.

Remember PowerShell 7 is still currently in preview, if you have any questions, please let me know in the comments.

Jun222019June 22, 2019September 22, 20197 Commentsby Thomas Maurer

Download the new Windows Terminal Preview

Install the new Windows Terminal (Preview)

Posted in Microsoft, PowerShell, Software, Windows, Windows 10, Windows Terminal, Work

At Microsoft Build 2019, the team announced a new Windows Terminal which will be open-source. There are a couple of improvements which are coming to the new Windows Terminal like; multiple tabs support, GPU accelerated DirectWrite/DirectX-based text rendering engine, advanced configuration settings, and much more. It allows you to run different shells like Windows PowerShell, PowerShell Core, Command Prompt, WSL, and also WSL 2. Today you can download the Windows Terminal Preview from the Microsoft Store. It is still a very early preview and the team, as well as the community, are still working on it. The team’s goal is to work with the community and launch version 1.0 end of 2019. Here is how you can install the new Windows Terminal.

Windows Terminal is a new, modern, fast, efficient, powerful, and productive terminal application for users of command-line tools and shells like Command Prompt, PowerShell, and WSL.

You can find more information about it here on the Microsoft announcement blog.

Download and Install the Windows Terminal

You were able to download the sources for the terminal from GitHub and build it yourself. However, the preview release in the Windows Store makes it much easier to try it out and stay more up to date.

Download Windows Terminal

Windows Terminal

Windows Terminal will be delivered via the Microsoft Store in Windows 10 and will be updated regularly, ensuring you are always up to date and able to enjoy the newest features and latest improvements with minimum effort.

Provide Feedback and get involved

Windows Terminal is a new, modern, feature-rich, productive terminal application for command-line users. It includes many of the features most frequently requested by the Windows command-line community including support for tabs, rich text, globalization, configurability, theming & styling, and more.
The Terminal will also need to meet our goals and measures to ensure it remains fast, and efficient, and doesn’t consume vast amounts of memory or power.

You can file bugs and share feedback with the community and us, as well as fix issues and make improvements on GitHub. If you come across any bugs or want to share feedback, you can do that on GitHub issues for detailed issues/discussions or with the Microsoft Store release in the Feedback Hub. You join the development on GitHub.

If you want to use the new font which was designed for terminals and code editors like VS Code, check out my post about Cascadia Code.

Azure Cloud Shell

Windows Terminal Azure Cloud Shell

I also want to mention that you can run the Azure Cloud Shell directly from the terminal.

Try out the new terminal today, and if you have any questions, please let me know in the comments.

Jun132019June 13, 2019August 1, 201915 Commentsby Thomas Maurer

Install WSL 2 on Windows 10

Posted in Hyper-V, Microsoft, PowerShell, Virtualization, Windows, Windows 10

With the Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 18917, the team also ships the first version of the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2), which was announced at the Microsoft Build 2019 conference. In this post, I am going to show you how you can install WSL 2 on your Windows 10 machine.

The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL 1) was in Windows 10 for a while now and allowed you to use different Linux distros directly from your Windows 10 machine. With WSL 2, the architecture will change drastically and will bring increased file system performance and full system call compatibility. WSL 2 is now using virtualization technology (based on Hyper-V) and uses a lightweight utility VM on a real Linux kernel. You can find out more about WSL 2 in the release blog or on the Microsoft Docs Page for WSL 2.

Requirements

To install WSL 2, you will need the following requirements:

Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 18917 or higher
A computer that supports Hyper-V Virtualization

Install WSL 2

To install the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2), you need to follow these tasks.

Enable the Windows Subsystem for Linux Optional feature (WSL 1 and WSL 2)
Install a distro for the Windows Subsystem for Linux
Enable the ‘Virtual Machine Platform’ optional feature (WSL 2)
Configure the distro to use WSL 2

Enable the Windows Subsystem for Linux

To run the WSL on Windows 10 you will need to install the optional feature:

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux

Install a Linux distro for the Windows Subsystem for Linux

If you don’t already have installed a WSL distro, you can download and install it from the Windows 10 store. You can find more here: Crazy times – You can now run Linux on Windows 10 from the Windows Store

Enable the Virtual Machine Platform feature

WSL 2 Enable Virtual Machine Platform

To make use of the virtualization feature for WSL 2, you will need to enable the optional Windows feature. You can run the following PowerShell command to do this. You will need to start PowerShell as an Administrator. After you run this command, you might need a restart of your computer.

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName VirtualMachinePlatform

Set WSL distro to use version 2

After you completed the first two steps, you will need to configure the distro to use WSL 2. Run the following command to list the available distros in PowerShell:

wsl -l -v

To set a distro to WSL 2 you can run the following command:

wsl --set-version DistroName 2

You can also set WSL 2 as the default:

wsl --set-default-version 2

To find out more about installing WSL 2, check out the Microsoft Docs page.

If you are now running your distro using WSL 2, you can now see that there is a Virtual Machine worker process running and if you search a little bit more, you can also find the VHDX file of the distro.

I hope this helps you and gives you a quick overview, if you have any questions, let me know in the comments and check out the WSL 2 FAQ. The Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Kernel is also open-source, you can follow the project on GitHub.

By the way, you can now also start using Docker Desktop together with the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2.

Tag: install

How to Install WSL 2 on Windows Server

Install Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2) on Windows Server

How to Install Hyper-V Server 2019

Hyper-V Server 2019 Requirements

Download ISO

Install Hyper-V Server 2019

How to Install and Update PowerShell 7

Install PowerShell 7 (Preview)

One-liner to install or update PowerShell 7 on Windows 10

One-liner to install or update PowerShell 7 on Linux

After Installing

Install the new Windows Terminal (Preview)

Download and Install the Windows Terminal

Windows Terminal

Provide Feedback and get involved

Azure Cloud Shell

Install WSL 2 on Windows 10

Requirements

Install WSL 2

Enable the Windows Subsystem for Linux

Install a Linux distro for the Windows Subsystem for Linux

Enable the Virtual Machine Platform feature

Set WSL distro to use version 2

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