Remotley Administer Server Core from Vista or Windows Server 2008

May 2, 2008

You can use Windows Remote Shell (WinRS) in Vista and Windows Server 2008 to remotely manage and administer Server Core. The WinRS client passes the commands to a WinRS listener on Server Core, which passes the commands to a prompt, captures the output and returns it to the WinRS client. To do this, you have to enable Windows Remote Managment (WinRM) on Server Core, you will run the following command :

winrm quickconfig

You can then run for example this command to see the license status on the Server Core remotely from Vista or the full installation on Windows Server 2008

winrs -r:NameofServerCore “cscript c:\Windows\System32\slmgr.vbs -dli”

Note that you can also use tools such as Windows Management Instrumentation command line (WMIC) and PowerShell thru WMI calls to manager Server Core. At this time Server Core does not support PowerShell directly since it relies on .NET Framework which is not there in Windows Server without Windows

Filed under: Server Core, Windows Server 2008 |