How to build a Windows Server in the Rackspace Cloud

Rackspace Cloud

The Rackspace Cloud is an IaaS cloud service that offers cloud hosted servers. I chose them over EC2 because they offer a Windows Server R2 x64 instance. EC2 does not have an AMI for Windows Server 2008 R2 yet (go figure?) and the on demand instances are less expensive by about $0.04 / hour. The sign-up was pretty straight forward and creating a cloud server was quite easy. Again my screen resolution made things a little awkward but it was definitely usable. The control panel where instances are created is much more intuitive than EC2 and much less cluttered. Creating a server was fairly easy. Overall, it took about 15 minutes. I have created three servers in the last few days and every time I encountered the same glitch. The control panel gave me a message that indicated that it couldn't update the status of my server. Both times when I renavigated to the control panel, my server was built and active.

Here are the steps that I followed to build my server:

1. Create an account at rackspacecloud.com and login to it.

2. Select Hosting.

Figure A

3. Select Cloud Servers.

Figure B

4. Click Add Server.

Figure C

5. Select Windows.

Figure D

6. Select the image that you want your server based on.

Figure E

7. Give your server a name and select the server size then press Create Server.

Figure F

8. The server will now be built.  You will see a rotating progress icon as in Figure E.

Figure E

Note: Every time I built a server I received the error pictured in Figure F.

Figure F

If you refresh the page the error should disappear, as in Figure H.

Figure H

9. Once your server is active (Figure I) you should receive an email from Rackspace giving you your server's IP address and the Administrator password. TIP: Since newer versions of the Microsoft Terminal Services Client do not permit pasting into the password field, you may prefer to give your server a short name as the auto-generated password will be your server name followed by a series of random characters. You can, always rename your server once you reset the password.

Figure I

10. Connect to your new server using the Rackspace VNC client or an RDP client (Remote Administration is turned on by default).

11. Check for patches and harden your server as appropriate.

source: techrepublic