Emergency management services

Since things don't always go as we planned, Microsoft added Emergency Management Services (EMS) to Nano Server.

Emergency Management Services (EMS) is a feature that offers remote management and system recovery options when other server administrative options are not possible. It is also needed for headless systems in which there is no GUI available, as in the case of Nano Server.

The communication works through the System Administration Channel (SAC) feature of Windows Server. The SAC channel offers several administrative features, such as enabling a Windows cmd.exe channel for Windows CLI access, listing processes running on the system, obtaining IP address information, retrieving server hardware information, and rebooting the server, to name just a few. Another important feature of the SAC channel is the ability to watch the boot and install progress of the server. See the TechNet article on EMS and SAC at technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc778042(v=ws.10).aspx for more information.

PuTTY is one of the tools that can be used in this case. The good news is that network and server vendors such as HPE and Dell EMC sometimes use redirect. So, they use EMS over TCP/IP to redirect serial ports to the network card called Virtual Serial Port (VSP). Thus, if you have a baseboard management port in your server, such as ILO or iDRAC, you can access a Nano Server machine over EMS in this way.

See Chapter 9, Troubleshooting Nano Server, for a walkthrough example that uses Windows EMS to manage HPE ProLiant servers.

If you want to use EMS, you can enable it in your boot configuration using bcedit. You can set EMS to on and then specify the port that you will communicate on, followed by the EMSBAUDRATE as well, which typically is 115200.

From an elevated command prompt, run the following:

bcdedit /ems {GUID for Nano Server boot option} ON 
bcdedit /emssettings EMSPORT:<port> EMSBAUDRATE:115200