Since I’ve decided to get more serious about updating my skills and knowledge again [also why I started blogging], I thought about getting a proper lab setup.

The goal is to have a small, portable but powerful Hyper-V based lab which I can carry along with me from home and to work if need be. Now I tend to have a test setup on my home machine and one on my work laptop, depending on what I need at that moment. Using this portable lab I want to make everything I need accessible from one location.

The Hardware

Long internal debates on what kind of hardware solution to use…

Go for an Intel NUC solution or Gigabyte Brix? Or perhaps getting a mini-ATX board and case and configuring the whole thing myself?

After randomly browsing on one of the local Dutch main hardware sites, I found a great offer to purchase an Intel NUC system along with the required RAM and M.2 SSD disk for a very good price. So good, that I ended up getting it the next morning 🙂

So here’s the setup:

• Intel NUC5i5RYK
• Kingston ValueRAM KVR16LS11/8 [2x8GB]
• Samsung 850 EVO M.2 250GB
• Mini-HDMI to HDMI converter

The Installation

One of the great things about Intel NUC [and Gigabyte Brix] systems is that it’s so easy to install.

Unscrew the 4 legs, remove the backplate, plug in the RAM modules and M.2 SSD chip and screw everything back again. If it takes you 5 minutes, you’re doing something very wrong 😉

Once this was done I needed to decide on Operating System. Choices:

• Windows Server 2012R2 ServerCore
• Windows Server 2012R2 Hyper-V [Hypervisor only]

I’m not sure if I want to manage only Hyper-V or perhaps set up a test lab domain, so I ended up going for the ServerCore installation using a ZALMAN ZM-VE300 USB3 solution.

I hooked up the NUC to our office’s beamer [as I didn’t have a monitor with HDMI connection, nor a mini-DisplayPort adapter] and booted up the machine with the Windows ISO as Virtual Disk.

Installation was just a few minutes work [literally 2 minutes max], after which I ran into somewhat of a problem: Windows was installed, but it couldn’t find an active NIC. Now that’s annoying for a ServerCore install!

The Problem

Since I only had access to the office’s meeting room for a limited period, I needed to find out how I could resolve this issue…

My main philosophy in my daily work is “if you’re having a problem, chances are someone’s had that same problem as well”, which leads me to one of my best friends in IT: Google!

It seems that there’s quite the issue with NUC NIC drivers for Window Server operating systems, because according to Intel NUC systems are designed as Desktop replacements, hence no server OS support for drivers.

Again, here’s where Google comes in handy. I found this article by Stephen Owen [@FoxDeploy] where he describes the perfect way download the latest driver for your NUC and modify the .inf file to allow for installation on your Windows Server OS.

Now I ran into a small issue with this article however: It was written for a Windows Server with GUI install, where you could simply get the Vendor ID and Device ID for the NIC from Device Manager.

As if it was meant to be, on the same day I ran into this problem, Steven posted the following blog on his site: Using PowerShell to find drivers for Device Manager.

Long story short, let’s combine the knowledge of both articles and get this NIC working!

The Code

Since this is a PowerShell related blog, let’s put it to good use to solve this problem! First of all, we need to find out the Vendor ID and Device ID. This command gets us all the Devices which aren’t correctly installed along with Vendor ID and Device ID:

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Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_PnpEntity | Where-Object {$_.ConfigManagerErrorCode -ne 0} | Select-Object Name,DeviceID

Save the resulting piece to a variable for later use:

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$NIC-DeviceId = 'VEN_8086&DEV_15A3'

Make sure to copy the contents of the latest extracted drivers to the ServerCore machine [USB stick recommended]

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Copy-Item -Path D:\Drivers\NIC\* -Recurse -Destination C:\Drivers\NIC

Now that we have the drivers on the machine, we can use our $NIC-DeviceId to find out which .inf file we need to modify:

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Get-ChildItem -Path C:\Drivers\NIC -Recurse | Select-String -Pattern $NIC-DeviceId | Group-Object Path | Select-Object Name

This command will display all the .inf files which contain the Vendor ID and Device ID match. For Windows 2012 R2 you need to check the x64 folders and NDIS64 subfolders, which in my case meant I needed the e1d64x64.inf file.

Ok, here’s what needs to be done in the .inf file:

• Either remove or comment out [using the ; sign] all the entries under the** [ControlFlags]** block.
• Check under the** [Intel.NTamd64.6.3.1]** block and copy ALL the lines related to your Device ID
• Paste these lines in the** [Intel.NTamd64.6.3]** block under the last lines
• Save the .inf file with the updated entries

Seems quite simple right?

Well, in order to install the drivers, you will need to perform one more magic trick. Because the drivers are unsigned and edited, Windows won’t allow you to install the drivers, so you’ll need to override these settings by running the following commands:

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bcdedit /set LOADOPTIONS DISABLE_INTEGRITY_CHECKS
bcdedit /set TESTSIGNING ON
bcdedit /set NOINTEGRITYCHECKS ON

Restart-Computer

Once this is done, you can “properly” install the drivers:

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pnputil -i -a C:\Drivers\NIC\PRO1000\Winx64\NDIS64\e1d64x64.inf

You should get a warning message saying that the driver is unsigned, but since we know this, we can choose to Install the driver anyways.

Almost done! Time to reset the security settings back to default:

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bcdedit /set LOADOPTIONS ENABLE_INTEGRITY_CHECKS
bcdedit /set TESTSIGNING OFF
bcdedit /set NOINTEGRITYCHECKS OFF

Restart-Computer

Now that we’ve restarted the machine it’s time to put this to a test:

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Get-NetAdapter

We’re online!!

Stay tuned for more Lab related posts to see more information/tips on how to set up your own Hyper-V lab op Windows ServerCore!