Server 2012 on USB drive?

[Gammawolf]

I can't seem to find much info on this as all that comes up is making a bootable usb drive for the installer files and not much on actually installing it to a usb drive? Is this possible?

 

[leigh_boy]

i woulg have thought so, get power iso and theres an option to burn the iso to the usb .. making it bootable.

 

[unleashed]

Have look at Windows 7 USB / DVD download tool here http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msstore/html/pbPage.Help_Win7_usbdvd_dwnTool

 

[iaind]

OP asks about installing 2012 to USB, specifically saying he doesn't want to install it from USB..... Gets 2 replies telling him how to install from USB.

I'm not sure it would be possible, or even sane to be honest. It's not designed to be an embedded type OS - it's one thing running something like ESXi from USB as you don't lose much if the USB stick dies and you don't need the capacity.

It begs the question......why?

 

[Shad]

I think the frequency of writes to the 'HDD' would wear out the flash in the USB stick pretty quickly too. I think your best bet might be to install to a HDD as normal and then clone the two partitions onto the USB stick.

 

[iaind]

Probably the only way to do it, use clonezilla or something. If it works at all it's still a bad idea!

 

[Deleted member 138126]

I can't seem to find much info on this as all that comes up is making a bootable usb drive for the installer files and not much on actually installing it to a usb drive? Is this possible?

It's possible with Windows 8; don't know about 2012, but they share a codebase, so I'd be surprised if it wasn't possible. It's called "Windows to go".

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831833.aspx

 

[Gammawolf]

OP asks about installing 2012 to USB, specifically saying he doesn't want to install it from USB..... Gets 2 replies telling him how to install from USB.

I'm not sure it would be possible, or even sane to be honest. It's not designed to be an embedded type OS - it's one thing running something like ESXi from USB as you don't lose much if the USB stick dies and you don't need the capacity.

It begs the question......why?

Its not a production environment, just my home server. It's basically going to be treated as a hyper-v / esxi / xen server. So i thought it would be convenient to install each to a USB drive. On the long term i'd be using server 2012, but it would just be a glorified hyper-v server with anything substantial running in backed up VM's. The base 2012 install would only every do hyper-v processing and possibly file server duties. So reliability isn't an issue really since these can be re-setup quickly

 

[iaind]

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee731893(v=ws.10).aspx

 

[unleashed]

Guys, I have learned something new here...will give it go when I can find a bit of spare time. The wealth of knowledge on these forums is amazing.