Share via

Nano Server 2016: How to deploy on VMWare Workstation 12.1 or higher

  • Article

 

Note

If you lose any section you will fail to deploy.

 

We need the following items to do this job successfully:

  • Latest Version of VMWare Tools File (To inject some VMWare Drivers into your image)
  • Windows Server 2016 Media (To generate a Nano Server image)
  • Hyper-V Management Tools Feature (To execute some PowerShell commands)
  • Free Virtual Disk Convertor (To convert your .vhdx to .vmdk file format)

First, please create a folder structure like this one on your computer:

**1.      ** C:\Temp\NanoServer

**2.      ** C:\Temp\NanoServer\NanoServerImageGenerator

**3.      ** C:\Temp\NanoServer\VirtualDisk

**4.      ** C:\Temp\NanoServer\VMDrivers

**5.      ** C:\Temp\VMWareTools

At next step, please run the VMWare Tools setup file in command prompt using “/a” switch to extract all the files in your desired folder (e.g. C:\Temp\VMWareTools). After extracting, find the folder name “VMware” under it, which contains all required drivers. Please copy only following folders and their contents into “C:\Temp\NanoServer\VMDrivers”.

  • pvscsi
  • vmxnet
  • vmxnet3

After above steps, you need to copy the “Nano Server Image Generator” scripts/module from your Windows Server 2016 Media (e.g. D:\NanoServer\NanoServerImageGenerator\.*) into “C:\Temp\NanoServer\NanoServerImageGenerator” then, go to the next step.

At this step, please open your PowerShell and go to the NanoServerImageGenerator folder that you created on your computer. Then run the following command at first step.

  • Import-Module .\NanoServerImageGenerator.psm1

Then run following command:

  • New-NanoServerImage -MediaPath D:\ -BasePath C:\Temp\NanoServer -TargetPath C:\Temp\NanoServer\VirtualDisk\NanoServer_HDD0.vhdx -Edition Standard -DeploymentType Host -ComputerName NanoServer01 -AdministratorPassword (ConvertTo-SecureString -String "Pass1234" -AsPlainText -Force) -DriverPath C:\Temp\NanoServer\VMDrivers
    • MediaPath: Is your Window Server 2016 Media Path
    • BasePath: Is your base path that you want to generate some folders like packages,
    • logs, etc.
    • TargetPath: Is the Virtual Disk path that will generate after executing this command
    • Edition: That is the Edition on the Nano Server that we want to generate it (Standard/Datacenter)
    • DeploymentType: Is the deployment type of Nano Server (Host/Guest). Note: We would need to set Host because you want to deploy it on another infrastructure instead of Hyper-V environment.
    • ComputerName: The Nano Server hostname that we want to deploy it.
    • AdministratorPassword: We can remove this option, then after executing the command we need to set the Administrator Password. In this case, our password is Pass1234 with capital P.
    • DriverPath: This is the driver path already copied to the VMDrivers folder in the previous steps.

After, execute the command successfully, we can find the Nano Server Virtual Disk under the desired path (C:\Temp\NanoServer\VirtualDisk).

Note: Before below step, we recommend to backup the created virtual disk.

In this step, we need to convert the virtual disk image into the VM Workstation desired file format (VMDK). We can convert it using the free third-party software. We used the “StarWind V2V Image Converter” convertor.

After the steps, we can find the VMDK file under the VirtualDisk folder that we created before.

Please copy VMDK file into the desired folder to create a new Virtual Machine in VMWare Workstation software.

In the VMWare Workstation please create a new machine with Windows Server 2016 operating system and select existing disk instead of creating a new disk. Also please select EFI instead of BIOS. After these steps, please close the VMWare Workstation application and we will go to the folder that contains the .vmx file. Please open the .vmx file with notepad or third-party editor application and then replace below parameters and save the file.

  • scsi0.virtualDev = "lsisas1068" ----> scsi0.virtualDev = "pvscsi"
  • ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000e" ----> ethernet0.virtualDev = "vmxnet3"

Congratulations, we deployed the Nano Server 2016 on your VMWare Workstation. Please open VMWare Workstation application and then we will start our Virtual Nano Server.