Nano is a super small light weight version of Windows Server, it’s an installation option of Standard and Datacenter edition, it’s about 400MB on disk that can run Hyper-V, DNS Server, IIS Server, Scale-out file Server, Failover Clustering and Containers, so it’s great to be a cloud platform system compute or storage host, because of its light weight, it’s has fewer services running, fewer ports open and gives you much small attack surface.
Nano Server is truly headless—there is no way to sign in locally or to use Remote Desktop to connect Remotely, you have to manage it remotely. Nano Server comes with built-in recovery console that allows you to fix your network.
The good news is, Microsoft just announced Sysinternals support for Nano Server.
Many of the existing Sysinternals tools that you are familiar with did not have command line version, as part of the porting process, Microsoft created a command line version for some of the tools, but in addition to that, they made them easy to work with PowerShell Remoting. The tools have been refactored to work with Nano APIs surface, because Nano is stripped down version essentially of Windows Server and not all the full richness of the Win32 tools is available, so the Sysinternals team breaks out the tools to 64-bit standalone executables.
As a first release, Microsoft ported over 39 of the Sysinternals tools support on Nano Server!
You can download the full set by clicking on the Sysinternals Nano Server Suite on the Sysinternals suite page as shown in the following screenshot, and each tool that supports Nano Server reports that on its download page. The Nano versions are also compatible with 64-bit Windows and have “64.exe” as their suffix in the download files.
Check how to get started with Nano Server.
Cheers,
-Ch@rbel
