Building a Hyper-V Server on an Intel NUC
Recently I was asked to build a solution to a problem at a small company where they needed a small server that didn't use much power, could run squid proxy and a DNS server. The office is relatively clean compared to the rest of the site, but it's no data center. The requirements were that it be reasonably reliable, low maintenance, have as few fans as possible and be cheap to run.
Enter the NUC! I've opted for the NUC6i5SYK with 16GB of RAM and a 250GB M.2 SSD.
The Equipment
Chassis: NUC6i5SYK
This is the 6th generation of the NUC and promises
I've probably gone a little overboard with the spec for this thing. Better safe than sorry though. Small businesses tend to demand longevity from their computers and to compensate for that I tend to over engineer them.
Installation
Installing Hyper-V server is fairly straight forward. You just need to download the ISO file and then flash it to a usb drive The rest of it is just like any other bare metal install. (F10 for boot menu)
Next comes the hard bit. Installing the network card drivers in Hyper-V server is way harder than it should be. I downloaded the Windows 8.1 Gigabit Ethernet Drivers for my NUC and then followed the instructions from the blog post Intel NUC D54250WYKH: Installing LAN Driver on Windows Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 It's not the same model but the method is the same. It's kind of easy to mess up the inf file though, so I suggest you make a copy of it before you make the changes.
Once you have the network card installed. Use SCONFIG to get those updates installed! They are important and can sometimes include bug fixes. So do this now before anything else.
I enabled Remote Desktop and and Change the hostname through SCONFIG.
I allowed RDP through the firewall by running the following powershell command:
set-NetFirewallRule -DisplayGroup "Remote Desktop" -Enabled True
If you are not going to use this on a domain and you want to be able to use Hyper-V manager like I do, then I suggest checking out Ben Armstrong's blog post that explains how to set up Hyper-V Remote management on workgroups. It is a little old, but I followed it for my windows 10 laptop and it still works. Just a word of warning though, the HVRemote script that Ben links to has not been tested for Win 10 and the author says that it could have unexpected results. This may be the case but I have run it on my computer and it still seems stable but since I can't read VBScript I actually have no idea what it is doing so use caution.