System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) provides some great automation benefits for those organizations that can afford the hefty price tag. However, if SCVMM isn’t a cost effective solution for your business, what are you to do? While VMM certainly makes automation much easier, you can achieve a good level of automation with PowerShell and the applicable PowerShell modules for Hyper-V, clustering, storage, and more.

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One of the first things IT Administrators and IT Managers notice after a fresh installation of Windows 2012 Server is that there are no Desktop Icons apart from the Recycle Bin. Desktop icons such as Computer, User’s Files, Network & Control Panel are not available by default. Desktop icons are now available through the Personalize menu, when right-clicking in an empty area on the desktop, however this menu option is not available by default.

Figure 1. Personalize Menu is not available by default on Windows 2012 Server

To bring back the Desktop icons, administrators must first install the Desktop Experience feature on Windows 2012 Server.

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Note: Once the Desktop Experience Feature is installed, the server will require a restart.

To do so, click on the Server Manager icon on the taskbar:

Figure 2. Server Manager icon on Windows 2012 Server taskbar

Now select Add Roles and Features:

IT professionals frequently need connectivity and management tools. The Telnet Client is one of the most basic tools for such activities. Using this tool, you can connect to a remote Telnet server and run applications on it. This is also a very useful tool for testing the connectivity to remote servers, such as those running SMTP services, web services and so on. In this article we will discuss how to install or enable Telnet client for Windows Server 2012, using the GUI interface or command prompt.

Microsoft operating systems since Windows NT have included the Telnet client as a feature. However, later Operating Systems beginning with the Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista prefer not to enable it by default. Although you can always use a third-party tool for assisting you in remote connections and for troubleshooting connectivity, you can enable the Telnet client on your Windows Server 2012 any time needed.

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Primarily, there are three ways you can install or enable the Telnet client for Windows Server 2012. You can install the Telnet client from the Graphical User Interface, Windows command prompt or from PowerShell. We will discuss all the methods in this article.

Installing Telnet Client from the GUI

Invoke the Server Manager by clicking on the second icon on the bottom taskbar on the desktop of the Windows Server 2012 R2:

Figure 1. Launching Windows Server Dashboard

On the Dashboard, click on Add Roles and Features, which opens the Add roles and features wizard:

 
Figure 2. Selecting Add roles and features on Windows Server 2012

Click on Installation Type and select Role Based or Feature Based Installation. Clickon Nextto proceed:

Figure 3. Selecting Installation Type – Role-based or feature-based installation

On the next screen, you can Select a server from the server pool. We select the server FW-DC1.firewall.local:

Microsoft introduced Fine-Grained Password Policy for the first time in Windows Server 2008 and the policy has been part of every Windows Server since then. Fine-Grained Password Policy allows overcoming the limitations of only one password policy for a single domain. A brief example is that we apply different password and account lockout policies to different users in a domain with the help of Fine-Grained Password Policies.
 
This article discusses the Fine-Grained Password Policy as applicable to Windows Server 2012, and the different ways of configuring this policy. Windows Server 2012 allows two methods of configuring the Fine-Grained Password Policy:

1. Using the Windows PowerShell

2. Using the Active Directory Administrative Center or ADAC

In earlier Windows Server editions, it was possible to configure Fine-Grained Password Policy only through the command line interface (CLI). However with Windows Server 2012 a graphical user interface has been added, allowing the configuration of the Fine-Grained Password Policy via the Active Directory Administrative Center. We will discuss both the methods.

Before you begin to implement the Fine-Grained Password Policy, you must make sure the domain functional level must be Windows Server 2008 or higher. Refer to relevant Windows 2012 articles on our website Firewall.cx.

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Configuring Fine-Grained Password Policy using the Windows PowerShell

Use your administrative credentials to login to your Windows Server 2012 domain controller. Invoke the PowerShell console by Right clicking on the third icon from the left in the taskbar on the Windows Server desktop and then clicking on Run as Administrator.

Figure 1. Executing Windows PowerShell as Administrator

Clicking on Yes to the UAC confirmation will open up an Administrator: Windows PowerShell console.

Within the PowerShell console, type the following command in order to begin the creation of a new fine grained password policy and press Enter:

C:\Windows\system32> New-ADFineGrainedPasswordPolicy

Figure 2. Creating a new Fine Grained Password Policy via PowerShell

Type a name for the new policy at the Name: prompt and press Enter. In our example, we named our policy FGPP:

Figure 3. Naming our Fine Grained Password Policy

Type a precedence index number at the Precedence: prompt and press Enter. Note that policies that have a lower precedence number have a higher priority over those with higher precedence numbers. We’ve set our new policy with a precedence of 15:

Figure 4. Setting the Precedence index number of our Fine Grained Password Policy

Now the policy is configured, but has all default values. If there is need to add specific parameters to the policy, you can do that by typing the following at the Windows PowerShell command prompt and press Enter:

C:\Windows\system32> New-ADFineGrainedPasswordPolicy -Name FGPP -DisplayName FGPP -Precedence 15 -ComplexityEnabled $true -ReversibleEncryptionEnabled $false -PasswordHistoryCount 20 -MinPasswordLength 10 -MinPasswordAge 3.00:30:00 -MaxPasswordAge 30.00:30:00 -LockoutThreshold 4 -LockoutObservationWindow 0.00:30:00 -LockoutDuration 0.00:45:00

In the above command, replace the name FGPP with the name of your password policy, which in our example is FGPP.

The parameters used in the above are mandatory and pretty much self-explanatory:

Attributes for Password Settings above include:

• Enforce password history
• Maximum password age
• Minimum password age
• Minimum password length
• Passwords must meet complexity requirements
• Store passwords using reversible encryption

Attributes involving account lockout settings include:

• Account lockout duration
• Account lockout threshold
• Reset account lockout after

To apply the policy to a user/group or users/groups, use the following command at the PowerShell command prompt:

For confirming whether the policy has indeed been applied to the groups/users correctly, type the following command at the PowerShell command prompt and press Enter:

The Microsoft KnowledgeBase provides high-quality articles covering Microsoft's technologies such as Windows Server (2019, 2016, 2012, 2008, 2003, 2000), Hyper-V Virtualization, Group Policies, Active Directory, Security and other Windows Services. The section also contains technical articles covering Windows workstation operating systems such as Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, Windows 11 and more.

This section is continuously populated with in-depth technical articles, providing detailed information and step-by-step instructions, ensuring our readers ,regardless of their level of experience, will be able to understand these technologies.

This section contains news related to Microsoft products and services. These include their popular Windows server products (2003, 2008, 2012), Windows workstation operating systems (Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 & 8.1), service pack releases and more.

There are umpteen reasons why your Windows Server 2012 R2 decides to present you with a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) or the stop screen. As virtual machines become more prominent in enterprise environments, the same problems that plagued physical servers earlier are now increasingly being observed for crashes of virtual machines as well.

Microsoft designs and configures Windows systems to capture information about the state of the operating systems if a total system failure occurs, unlike a failure of an individual application. You can see and analyze the captured information in the dump files, the settings of which you can configure using the System Tool in the Control Panel. By default, BSOD provides minimal information about the possible cause of the system crash and this may suffice in most circumstances to help in identifying the cause of the crash.

However, some crashes may require a deeper level of information than what the stop screen provides – for example, when your server simply hangs and becomes unresponsive. In that case, you may still be able to see the desktop, but moving the mouse or pressing keys on the keyboard produces no response. To resolve the issue, you need a memory dump. This is basically a binary file that contains a portion of the server's memory just before it crashed. Windows Server 2012 R2 provides five options for configuring memory dumps.

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Types of Memory Dump Files Possible

1. Automatic Memory Dump

Automatic memory dump is the default memory dump that Windows Server 2012 R2 starts off with. This is really not a new memory dump type, but is a Kernel memory dump that allows the SMSS process to reduce the page file to be smaller than the size of existing RAM. Therefore, this System Managed page file now reduces the size of page file on disk.

2. Complete Memory Dump

A complete memory dump is a record of the complete contents of the physical memory or RAM in the computer at the time of crash. Therefore, this needs a page file that is at least as large as the size of the RAM present plus 1MB. The complete memory dump will usually contain data from the processes that were running when the dump was collected. A subsequent crash will overwrite the previous contents of the dump.

3. Kernel Memory Dump

The kernel memory dump records only the read/write pages associated with the kernel-mode in physical memory at the time of crash. The non-paged memory saved in the kernel memory dump contains a list of running processes, state of the current thread and the list of loaded drivers. The amount of kernel-mode memory allocated by Windows and the drivers present on the system define the size of the kernel memory dump.

4. Small Memory Dump

A small memory dump or a MiniDump is a record of the stop code, parameters, list of loaded device drivers, information about the current process and thread, and includes the kernel stack for the thread that caused the crash.

5. No Memory Dump

Sometimes you may not want a memory dump when the server crashes.

Configuring Dump File Settings

This category contains articles covering the installation and configuration of Windows 2003 Server services. All articles contain step-by-step screenshots to make them easier to follow. No matter how novice or advanced your knowledge on Windows 2000 Technologies is, following the provided instructions is very easy and straight-forward.

We hope you enjoy the provided articles and welcome your feedback and suggestions.

This section contains technical articles, content and resources for IT Professionals working with Microsoft's Windows 2012 & Windows 2012 R2 server. Our content covers basic and advanced configuration of Windows 2012 components, services, technologies and much more, and has been written in an easy-to-follow manner.

We hope you enjoy the provided articles and welcome your feedback and suggestions.