So we decided to set up at least one of the servers in our data center with Windows 2008 Server Core. It looks like a nice way to reduce the footprint of the install, but it does require some contorsions in order to properly set it up. My challenge today was to get remote disk management up and running so I could play around with our disks a bit and see what xenServer and Windows 2008 allowed us to do.

Thankfully, I found a bit of information about this on the web. Rob Whitehouse has a script here that he uses and it points out the need to open up the firewall with these two commands on the Server Core machine (the one you are trying to administer).

netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group=”remote administration” new enable=yes
netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group=”Remote Volume Management” new enable=yes

He also helpfully points out that you need to do

netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group=”Remote Volume Management” new enable=yes

On the machine doing the administration. I couldn't get that command to work from the command line (I was told I needed elevation) but I could make that change through the Windows Firewall MMC plug-in.

Then you need to start the VDS service on the Core install machine and set the VDS service to auto start (if you want that available in the future without manually starting it). You can do that through the MMC or these commands work as well

sc config vds start=auto
net start vds

There some more information in the Microsoft Technet blog here.