Hey guys! So here's my adventure in deploying Windows Server 2016 Nano on a physical server. It was a hard fought battle, but I finally won.

Note: SQL Server 2016 is not compatible with Windows Server 2016 Nano. This install was for clustering two physical Hyper-V servers.

So here goes!

Nano VHD Creation:

You will need to create a .wim file as well as copying WinPE onto a USB drive. It is necessary to have the Windows Server 2016 ISO mounted or use something like WinISO and copy the contents onto your local computer so you can run Powershell commands to create the .wim.

1) Open Powershell as Admin

2) Import-Module .\NanoServerImageGenerator.psm1 -Verbose

3) New-NanoServerImage -Edition Datacenter-DeploymentType Host -MediaPath "D:\Windows 2016 ISO" -BasePath .\Base -TargetPath .\NanoServerPhysical\NanoServer_NanoServer.wim -ComputerName -OEMDrivers -Compute -Clustering -EnableRemoteManagementPort -Storage -DomainName -InterfaceNameOrIndex "Ethernet" -Ipv4Address "" -Ipv4SubnetMask "" -Ipv4Gateway ""

Note1: D:\ is where my Windows Server 2016 contents reside

Note2: Replace with your desired computer name

Note3: Replace with your domain name

Note4: Replace with your desired IP

Note5: Replace with, you guessed it, your desired subnet mask

Note6: Replace with your desired gateway IP

Note7: -Clustering is for clustering your servers

Note8: -DeploymentType Host is for physical servers. Use Guest if you're installing Nano on a VM.

4) Copy WinPE and the .wim file you just created onto your USB drive

5) Stick the USB drive into your physical server

6) Boot to USB drive

7) Execute diskpart

a) select disk 0

b) clean

c) create partition primary size=300

d) format fs=ntfs label="System Reserved" quick

e) assign letter=s

f) active

g) create partition primary

h) format fs=ntfs label="NanoServer" quick

i) assign letter=n

j) list volume

k) exit

8) Go to your USB drive letter. Mine is D:\

9) dism.exe /apply-image imagefile:d:\NanoServer.wim /index:1 /applydir:n:\

10) N:

11) bcdboot.exe n:\Windows /s s:

12) Remove USB drive

13) wpeutil.exe reboot

Next post will be about configuring Nano.

Thanks for reading!