White Papers

Building Microsoft Windows 2012 Clusters on the Dell PowerEdge VRTX 9
Windows installation and configuration on VRTX
supported server node(s)
This section provides an overview of the OS installation process using bootable optical media.
Following the OS installation instructions are steps for configuring the OS roles and features. Steps are
provided for the SPERC driver installation and required registry entries. Steps are also provided for
validation and creation of failover clustering. Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and 2012 are both
supported failover clustering platforms on the VRTX chassis.
For a detailed description of the installation of the OS using the Dell Systems Management Tools and
Documentation or your own OS media, refer to the
Microsoft Windows Server 2012 For Dell
PowerEdge Systems Installation Instructions and Important Information
guide on
Dell.com/Support/Manuals.
Basic OS installation steps
1. Configure the system to boot from optical media.
2. Insert the bootable Microsoft Windows Server 2012 installation disk into the optical drive in
the chassis or USB port on the blade server.
3. Insert the USB device with the OS drivers located in the $WinPEdriver$ folder For A-rev,
shouldn’t we tell them to use LC?
4. Power on the blade server.
5. Follow the prompts to boot from optical media, and the prompts to install the OS on the local
disk located in the blade.
6. Enter the product key if required.
7. Follow the prompts to complete the Windows Server installation.
8. Enter the administrator password and login in Windows Server.
Role configuration and feature enablement
This section provides instructions for enabling the Hyper-V role and failover cluster feature
enablement in Windows Server. These steps for role configuration and feature enablement can be
combined to eliminate the need for two separate operations.
Note: These roles and features must be enabled on every server node(s)
that will be configured as part of the failover cluster.