Customers with their own Windows Server retail licenses may prefer to deploy BinaryLane servers with their own Windows Server license keys.
With BinaryLane's BYO Operating System functionality, our residents can upload an ISO and install any operating system* desired. This guide will walk through the process of signing up, uploading the ISO, and installing Windows Server.
By using your own retail Windows Server license key, the VPS plan costs are the same as our Linux VPS plans, which don't have the additional licensing costs of our Windows Server VPS plans.
Microsoft do not allow deployment of volume licenses on third-party servers.
* Provided the operating system has KVM drivers
1. Create your Windows Server VPS
Head over to the signup page, the first step is to select the location of your server, then select an operating system - just click "BYO ISO" at the end of the list.
https://www.binarylane.com.au/vps/signup
In the second step when selecting a plan, select the resources you require. Windows Server will fit comfortably onto our $8.00/month plan, but you may need more resources for your intended workload.
In the third step when selecting a hostname, simply enter the name you want to access the server by, or leave it blank to use a randomly generated, two-word identifier assigned to each BinaryLane VPS. Reverse DNS will be automatically set from either option.
Proceed through the account and billing details setup, and in thirty seconds your VPS will be ready and waiting for your ISO upload.
1.a Change Advanced Settings to attach Windows driver CD
After completing signup, mPanel will drop us straight into the Upload screen so that you can provide the ISO to use during installation
We won't upload our Windows Server ISO just yet, as the installation process will require additional storage drivers so the Windows installation can detect and use your server's disk. We'll also install network drivers the server will need.
A driver disk needs to be attached to the VPS before the Windows Server installation can proceed. BinaryLane provides a Windows driver disk on the Advanced Settings page.
Click the gear icon and select Advanced Settings.
Enable the Windows driver CD option, then click Save and Apply.
We might need to Force Shutdown at this point, as we don't having a working installation that accepts reboot commands yet.
2. Upload your Windows Server ISO
Now that we have the Windows driver CD attached, we can upload our Windows Server ISO.
Click the gear icon on the dashboard page again and browse to Backups & ISOs
On the Backups & ISO Management page, go to the Upload tab, and using the Upload will: drop down, select Create new temporary image
When selecting where to Upload from - BinaryLane can accept ISOs either uploaded from your local PC, or an HTTP URL can be supplied for the ISO to be retrieved from.
A local file is useful if you have a custom-modified distribution, but generally the HTTP server option is preferred since the operating system's mirror network can be used, or you might have the ISO on your own webserver.
Finally, click the Start Upload button to transfer the ISO to BinaryLane. Once the transfer has started, the progress of the upload is displayed.
When the upload is complete, a message is displayed that the ISO has been uploaded and can now be attached.
Click Attach & Boot CD. We'll see the progress of the ISO being attached.
We'll need to Force Shutdown again, since we don't have a working install yet.
Once the ISO is attached and the server rebooted, we'll be taken to the dashboard:
3. Installing drivers
Select your preferred language, time and currency, and keyboard preferences, then continue on, entering your license key and accepting the license terms to proceed with the installation.
The Windows Server installation won't find a drive that the operating system can be installed on, so we'll click Load driver and browse to the virtio-win-0.1.1 drive, and the viostor directory to find our operating system version to install storage drivers.
The installation should pick up the storage driver now. Select the driver and click Next.
We'll need to install network drivers as well, so click the Load driver button again, browse to the driver disk, select your OS version from the NetKVM directory, and click next.
Back on the drive selection screen, the drive and network drivers now installed, click next.
We'll see Windows copying files from the ISO, and will automatically reboot when it has finished. We don't need to detach the installation ISO at this stage, as Windows will continue its setup process if no keys are pressed during bootup.
Once the server has rebooted, we should be prompted to customise settings, and create a password for the Administrator account.
Our Windows Server installation is now complete, but we'll need to enable Remote Desktop access so we can log in over RDP.
Log into the server using the rescue console, by clicking 'Send Ctrl+Alt+Del' to bring up the login screen.
Locate the system configuration setting to enable Remote Desktop access. On this version of Windows it's found in Settings - Remote Desktop
Once Remote Desktop is enabled, we can immediately log into the server with a remote desktop client. Testing the Remote Desktop login with the Administrator account should log us out in the rescue console window if successful.