Introduction

Evaluating Windows Server 2008 software does not require product activation. Any edition of Windows Server 2008 may be installed without activation, and it may be evaluated for 60 days. Additionally, the 60-day evaluation period may be reset (re-armed) three times. This action extends the original 60-day evaluation period by up to 180 days for a total possible evaluation time of 240 days.

Note In the Windows Server 2008 Evaluation DVD package, there is a 120-day initial evaluation period. You can extend the evaluation period to 240 days. To extend the initial evaluation and testing period, follow the steps in this Microsoft Knowledge Base article.

How to install Windows Server 2008 without activating it

1. Run the Windows Server 2008 Setup program.

2. When you are prompted to enter a product key for activation, do not enter a key. Click No when Setup asks you to confirm your selection.

3. You may be prompted to select the edition of Windows Server 2008 that you want to evaluate. Select the edition that you want to install.

Note After Windows Server 2008 is installed, the edition cannot be changed without reinstalling it.

4. When you are prompted, read the evaluation terms in the Microsoft Software License Terms, and then accept the terms.

5. When the Windows Server 2008 Setup program is finished, your initial 60-day evaluation period starts. To check the time that is left on your current evaluation period, run the Slmgr.vbs script that is in the System32 folder. Use the -dli switch to run this script. The slmgr.vbs -dli command displays the number of days that are left in the current 60-day evaluation period.

How to manually extend the evaluation period

When the initial 60-day evaluation period nears its end, you can run the Slmgr.vbs script to reset the evaluation period. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Click Start, and then click Command Prompt.

2. Type slmgr.vbs -dli, and then press ENTER to check the current status of your evaluation period.

3. To reset the evaluation period, type slmgr.vbs –rearm, and then press ENTER.

4. Restart the computer.

This resets the evaluation period to 60 days.

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We will work tirelessly to provide a refreshing and friendly level of customer service. We believe in creativity, innovation, and a competitive spirit in all that we do. We are sound, honest company who feels that business is more than just the bottom line. We consider every business opportunity a chance to engage and interact with our customers and our community. Neither our clients nor our employees are a commodity. They are part of our family.

The followings are the top 10 reasons you should trust your online business and hosting needs to us:

- FREE domain for Life - HostForLife gives you your own free domain name for life with our Professional Hosting Plan and 3 free domains with any of Reseller Hosting Plan! There’s no need to panic about renewing your domain as HostForLIfe will automatically do this for you to ensure you never lose the all important identity of your site
- 99,9% Uptime Guarantee - HostForLife promises it’s customers 99.9% network uptime! We are so concerned about uptime that we set up our own company to monitor people’s uptime for them called HostForLife Uptime
- 24/7-based Support - We never fall asleep and we run a service that is opening 24/7 a year. Even everyone is on holiday during Easter or Christmast/New Year, we are always behind our desk serving our customers
- Customer Tailored Support - if you compare our hosting plans to others you will see that we are offering a much better deal in every aspect; performance, disk quotas, bandwidth allocation, databases, security, control panel features, e-mail services, real-time stats, and service
- Money Back Guarantee - HostForLife offers a ‘no questions asked’ money back guarantee with all our plans for any cancellations made within the first 30 days of ordering. Our cancellation policy is very simple - if you cancel your account within 30 days of first signing up we will provide you with a full refund
- Experts in IIS 7.5 Hosting - Given the scale of our environment, we have recruited and developed some of the best talent in the hosting technology that you are using. Our team is strong because of the experience and talents of the individuals who make up HostForLife
- Daily Backup Service - We realise that your website is very important to your business and hence, we never ever forget to create a daily backup. Your database and website are backup every night into a permanent remote tape drive to ensure that they are always safe and secure. The backup is always ready and available anytime you need it
- Easy Site Administration - With our powerful control panel, you can always administer most of your site features easily without even needing to contact for our Support Team. Additionally, you can also install more than 100 FREE applications directly via our Control  Panel in 1 minute!

Happy Hosting!

One of the most frustrating tasks for system administrators in Windows Server 2000 and 2003 is performing a restore of a server to new hardware. Nearly always the new hardware differs from the original server. If a direct restore is done from the backup (whether it be file-based or image-based), the new server often will BSOD, complaining about errors with HAL.SYS. This occurred because of driver and HAL differences between the old and new hardware.

This meant that a market developed for 3rd party solutions that enable the restore to dissimilar hardware by patching the registry and installing additional drivers before the newly restored system started. Such products, like Backup Exec System Recovery and Acronis True Image often cost upwards of $1000.

However, using the standard built-in Backup and Restore infrastructure in Windows Server 2008 and derivatives (SBS 2008 and EBS 2008), it is possible to restore an entire system to dissimilar hardware. In a presentation he gave at SMB Nation 2008, Jeff Middleton MVP stated that hardware independent restore was actually part of the design specification of Windows Server 2008.

And we tried really hard to break it. We did all sorts of ridiculous bare metal restores - from AMD to Intel, from single core to dual core to quad core, from single to dual CPUs, RAID to no RAID and vice versa.

And it worked flawlessly each time.

Our tests- restoring to dissimilar physical hardware

Windows Vista installation tests:

- Acer Aspire 1340 Laptop (AMD) > AMD Sempron Desktop

Windows Server 2008 installation tests:

1. Intel Xeon Dual CPU Dual Core Server w. RAID > AMD Phenom Single CPU Quad Core Desktop

2. AMD Phenom Single CPU Quad Core Desktop > Intel Xeon Dual CPU Dual Core Server w. RAID

3. 3rd test - Specs to get off Linus' Server 2008 DEV and Mel's DEV desktop >

Test results- restoring to and from virtual hardware

For the purposes of testing virtualisation, we used the free version of VMware Server 1.0.6 - freely downloadable from the VMware website.

Windows Server 2008 installation tests:

1. AMD Phenom Quad Core > VM on AMD Sempron Single Core

2. VM on AMD Sempron Single Core > Intel Xeon Dual Core Dual CPU w. RAID

and the reverse path:

3. Intel Xeon Dual Core Dual CPU w. RAID > VM on AMD Sempron Single Core

4. VM on AMD Sempron Single Core > AMD Phenom Quad Core

Conclusion

We certainly couldn't fault the bare metal restoration features in Windows Server 2008. After conducting so many tests, we feel confident that it will work when required. Another good feature of Microsoft's restore wizard is the "Have disk" button that allows you to load additional drivers at restore-time. This means that if you're restoring to hardware that's new, such as a RAID array, you can load up the drivers (especially important for RAID controllers, given that without the driver, you can't see the disk array and thus can't restore), perform the restoration, and then the new drivers are automatically on the newly restored system.

What is so SPECIAL on HostForLife.eu IIS 7.5 Hosting?

We know that finding a cheap, reliable web host is not a simple task so we’ve put all the information you need in one place to help you make your decision. At HostForLife, we pride ourselves in our commitment to our customers and want to make sure they have all the details they need before making that big decision.

We will work tirelessly to provide a refreshing and friendly level of customer service. We believe in creativity, innovation, and a competitive spirit in all that we do. We are sound, honest company who feels that business is more than just the bottom line. We consider every business opportunity a chance to engage and interact with our customers and our community. Neither our clients nor our employees are a commodity. They are part of our family.

The followings are the top 10 reasons you should trust your online business and hosting needs to us:

- FREE domain for Life - HostForLife gives you your own free domain name for life with our Professional Hosting Plan and 3 free domains with any of Reseller Hosting Plan! There’s no need to panic about renewing your domain as HostForLIfe will automatically do this for you to ensure you never lose the all important identity of your site
- 99,9% Uptime Guarantee - HostForLife promises it’s customers 99.9% network uptime! We are so concerned about uptime that we set up our own company to monitor people’s uptime for them called HostForLife Uptime
- 24/7-based Support - We never fall asleep and we run a service that is opening 24/7 a year. Even everyone is on holiday during Easter or Christmast/New Year, we are always behind our desk serving our customers
- Customer Tailored Support - if you compare our hosting plans to others you will see that we are offering a much better deal in every aspect; performance, disk quotas, bandwidth allocation, databases, security, control panel features, e-mail services, real-time stats, and service
- Money Back Guarantee - HostForLife offers a ‘no questions asked’ money back guarantee with all our plans for any cancellations made within the first 30 days of ordering. Our cancellation policy is very simple - if you cancel your account within 30 days of first signing up we will provide you with a full refund
- Experts in IIS 7.5 Hosting - Given the scale of our environment, we have recruited and developed some of the best talent in the hosting technology that you are using. Our team is strong because of the experience and talents of the individuals who make up HostForLife
- Daily Backup Service - We realise that your website is very important to your business and hence, we never ever forget to create a daily backup. Your database and website are backup every night into a permanent remote tape drive to ensure that they are always safe and secure. The backup is always ready and available anytime you need it
- Easy Site Administration - With our powerful control panel, you can always administer most of your site features easily without even needing to contact for our Support Team. Additionally, you can also install more than 100 FREE applications directly via our Control  Panel in 1 minute!

Happy Hosting!

Using the Windows Recovery Environment on Windows Server 2008 you can perform a bare-metal restore to recover your server operating system or the entire server itself. An operating system restore will only recover critical drive volumes that contain system components. If you would like to restore all volumes, you will need to conduct a full server recovery.

Before attempting to complete an operating system or full server restoration from a drive image backup created with BackupAssist, make sure of the following:

- You have a Windows Server 2008 setup/installation disc.

- If you are recovering to a new hard disk, make sure the disk is at least as big as the disk that contained the volumes that were backed up, regardless of the size of those volumes. For example, if there was only one volume that was 100 GB on a 1 TB disk during backup, you should use a disk that is at least 1 TB when restoring.

- If you are recovering just the operating system, make sure that you have a backup available that contains at least the critical volumes of the server. If you are recovering the full server, make sure that you have a backup available that contains all volumes of the server.

Performing a bare metal recovery- step by step

1. Boot the Windows Server 2008 from the installation media and select the appropriate settings for:

- Language to install
- Time and currency format
- Keyboard or input format

When you've selected your settings, click on the Next button.

2. In the next window, select the Repair your Computer option from the lower left corner of the console.

3. From the System Recovery Options window, you can choose to load any drivers required by your hard disk at this stage.  After loading any necessary drivers, such as RAID drivers, click on the Next button.

Note that if you are performing a bare-metal restore to a brand new hard-disk, you will not see any Operating Systems listed as shown on the right.

If you are restoring a backup to a machine that already has Windows 2008, then it will be listed under Operating Systems.

4. Under the System Recovery Options window, select the Windows Complete PC Restore option. This will invoke the Windows Recovery Environment.

5. Windows will then scan your machine for available backups. Please ensure that the media with your backup is connected to the machine. If Windows Complete PC Restore is unable to find the backup, please try un-connecting and re-connecting the backup device.

6. Once your backup disk has been detected, you may choose to restore the latest backup or another backup. Windows 2008 will automatically choose your latest backup by default.

Select the backup you want to restore from and click on the Next button.

7. In the Choose how to restore your backupwindow, you have the following options:

- Install any drivers for the disk you are restoring to by clicking on the Install Drivers button.

- Exclude disks that you don't want formatted by clicking on the Exclude disks button.

- Choose to restart the computer after the restore process and to automatically check and update error information by clicking on the Advanced button.

Once you have added the extra options, click on the Next button.

8. Select the location of your backup and click on the Next button.

9. Confirm your settings and click on the Finish button.

10. Windows Recovery Environment will ask you whether you want to let Windows Complete PC Restore format the disks and restore the backups you have chosen. Click on the OK button.

11. Your bare-metal restore of Windows Server 2008 should begin. Once done, your system should reboot and Windows will load. Congratulations - the procedure is complete!

What is so SPECIAL on HostForLife.eu IIS 7.5 Hosting?

We know that finding a cheap, reliable web host is not a simple task so we’ve put all the information you need in one place to help you make your decision. At HostForLife, we pride ourselves in our commitment to our customers and want to make sure they have all the details they need before making that big decision.

We will work tirelessly to provide a refreshing and friendly level of customer service. We believe in creativity, innovation, and a competitive spirit in all that we do. We are sound, honest company who feels that business is more than just the bottom line. We consider every business opportunity a chance to engage and interact with our customers and our community. Neither our clients nor our employees are a commodity. They are part of our family.

The followings are the top 10 reasons you should trust your online business and hosting needs to us:

- FREE domain for Life - HostForLife gives you your own free domain name for life with our Professional Hosting Plan and 3 free domains with any of Reseller Hosting Plan! There’s no need to panic about renewing your domain as HostForLIfe will automatically do this for you to ensure you never lose the all important identity of your site
- 99,9% Uptime Guarantee - HostForLife promises it’s customers 99.9% network uptime! We are so concerned about uptime that we set up our own company to monitor people’s uptime for them called HostForLife Uptime
- 24/7-based Support - We never fall asleep and we run a service that is opening 24/7 a year. Even everyone is on holiday during Easter or Christmast/New Year, we are always behind our desk serving our customers
- Customer Tailored Support - if you compare our hosting plans to others you will see that we are offering a much better deal in every aspect; performance, disk quotas, bandwidth allocation, databases, security, control panel features, e-mail services, real-time stats, and service
- Money Back Guarantee - HostForLife offers a ‘no questions asked’ money back guarantee with all our plans for any cancellations made within the first 30 days of ordering. Our cancellation policy is very simple - if you cancel your account within 30 days of first signing up we will provide you with a full refund
- Experts in IIS 7.5 Hosting - Given the scale of our environment, we have recruited and developed some of the best talent in the hosting technology that you are using. Our team is strong because of the experience and talents of the individuals who make up HostForLife
- Daily Backup Service - We realise that your website is very important to your business and hence, we never ever forget to create a daily backup. Your database and website are backup every night into a permanent remote tape drive to ensure that they are always safe and secure. The backup is always ready and available anytime you need it
- Easy Site Administration - With our powerful control panel, you can always administer most of your site features easily without even needing to contact for our Support Team. Additionally, you can also install more than 100 FREE applications directly via our Control  Panel in 1 minute!

Happy Hosting!

The new block-level backup infrastructure in Windows Server 2008 (which is also in Windows Vista Business, Enterprise and Ultimate) is aimed at making server recovery fast. Let's discuss how it works from a variety of angles.

Image Based Backup

For starters, the new WSB is a block-level volume image based solution. As such, it runs appreciably faster than file-level backup solutions as the usual overhead of opening and closing each file to be backed up is not required. As an image based solution, it is also geared towards fast system recovery, going the route that was pioneered by products such as Acronis, Ghost and Backup Exec System Recovery.

The specific implementation that Microsoft has provided has the following characteristics:

- You can only select entire volumes for backup, not individual files and directories.

- The resulting backup file is a VHD file

- The backup is a selective image - not a forensic clone - of the source volumes. This means that things like blank space, the page file, hibernate file, and certain folders are not backed up.

Fast differential images

By default, the backups performed are fast differentials, where only changed blocks are backed up. (Note: Microsoft refers to them as incremental, but we believe differential to be a more accurate term.)

A good way to imagine how this works is by imagining your machine's life disk volumes on the left, the backup device on the right, and an intelligent comparison machine in the middle, transferring blocks across.

There are some very important things to note:

- The backup device looks like it always contains the last full backup, even though only changed blocks were transferred

- Restores are easy - like restoring a full backup, and not having to worry about the traditional Full + Incremental + Incremental...

- Successive backups are fast in typical scenarios because only a small percentage of the disk changes on a day to day basis

Automatic disk space management

Another bonus is that you will never run out of disk space caused by the accumulation of previous backups. (Note: Of course, you will run out of space if the total data you're trying to back up exceeds the capacity of the backup device.)

Past versions are automatically discarded as the backup device fills up. This happens automatically.

VSS base file and application backup

The entire backup system is based on VSS, which is used to tell which blocks have changed. The exact way this works has not been published by Microsoft; however from our testing we believe it to be based around using persistent snapshots and comparing differences between the snapshots.

Because the system is based on VSS (unlike some other drive imaging products), it means that it's possible to backup VSS aware applications, like Exchange Server 2007, SQL Server 2005 and SharePoint Services. At the time of the backup, WSB will issue a notification to VSS that a backup is about to start, and in turn, VSS will notify the VSS aware applications to commit their data to disk. This means that the backup will be consistent, and any open databases will have their data committed and in a consistent state.

Restores

There are two different restore procedures:

- Bare metal restore - that is, restoring to a new system that does not have an OS already installed on it. This can be done by booting off the original Windows install DVD, choosing to run the Windows Complete PC Restore (yes - they forgot to rename it to Windows Server Backup restore!) and then following the wizard.

- Individual file and folder restore - by following the wizards you can restore individual files and folders -

Limitations of Windows Server Backup

As with most things that come built-into the operating system, there are limitations in what's built into Windows. Most notably, the monitoring and reporting side is extremely weak, and there are also several gaping holes in terms of hardware support.

Monitoring and reporting

- No concept of media rotation strategies
- The wizards do not show
- No such thing as emailing the backup status report
- No way to automatically see what versions of backups are available on the backup device
- The drive letter is removed from backup devices
- No centralized monitoring ability for monitoring large numbers of servers

Hardware Support

- Cannot set up automated backups to rdx and REV drives using the Microsoft wizards
- Cannot set up automated backups to NAS using the Microsoft wizards

Selection of items to backup

- Can only select entire volumes to backup, not individual files and folders
- Can only select local volumes to backup, not network shares

These matters are discussed further in the articles on this website. All of these limitations are addressed by the 3rd party product called BackupAssist.

Conclusion

The major functionality available in Windows Server Backup is undoubtedly the hardware independent server restores from bare metal. In previous operating systems, to achieve this, you'd have to spend thousands of dollars on 3rd party imaging solutions. Now, it's free.

However, there are a considerable number of limitations that can only be overcome by extensive scripting and manual scheduling, or by using a 3rd party product like BackupAssist.

What is so SPECIAL on HostForLife.eu IIS 7.5 Hosting?

We know that finding a cheap, reliable web host is not a simple task so we’ve put all the information you need in one place to help you make your decision. At HostForLife, we pride ourselves in our commitment to our customers and want to make sure they have all the details they need before making that big decision.

We will work tirelessly to provide a refreshing and friendly level of customer service. We believe in creativity, innovation, and a competitive spirit in all that we do. We are sound, honest company who feels that business is more than just the bottom line. We consider every business opportunity a chance to engage and interact with our customers and our community. Neither our clients nor our employees are a commodity. They are part of our family.

The followings are the top 10 reasons you should trust your online business and hosting needs to us:

- FREE domain for Life - HostForLife gives you your own free domain name for life with our Professional Hosting Plan and 3 free domains with any of Reseller Hosting Plan! There’s no need to panic about renewing your domain as HostForLIfe will automatically do this for you to ensure you never lose the all important identity of your site
- 99,9% Uptime Guarantee - HostForLife promises it’s customers 99.9% network uptime! We are so concerned about uptime that we set up our own company to monitor people’s uptime for them called HostForLife Uptime
- 24/7-based Support - We never fall asleep and we run a service that is opening 24/7 a year. Even everyone is on holiday during Easter or Christmast/New Year, we are always behind our desk serving our customers
- Customer Tailored Support - if you compare our hosting plans to others you will see that we are offering a much better deal in every aspect; performance, disk quotas, bandwidth allocation, databases, security, control panel features, e-mail services, real-time stats, and service
- Money Back Guarantee - HostForLife offers a ‘no questions asked’ money back guarantee with all our plans for any cancellations made within the first 30 days of ordering. Our cancellation policy is very simple - if you cancel your account within 30 days of first signing up we will provide you with a full refund
- Experts in IIS 7.5 Hosting - Given the scale of our environment, we have recruited and developed some of the best talent in the hosting technology that you are using. Our team is strong because of the experience and talents of the individuals who make up HostForLife
- Daily Backup Service - We realise that your website is very important to your business and hence, we never ever forget to create a daily backup. Your database and website are backup every night into a permanent remote tape drive to ensure that they are always safe and secure. The backup is always ready and available anytime you need it
- Easy Site Administration - With our powerful control panel, you can always administer most of your site features easily without even needing to contact for our Support Team. Additionally, you can also install more than 100 FREE applications directly via our Control  Panel in 1 minute!

Happy Hosting!