Hi All,
i have a little issue. My client has a US satellite office and the server on site needs to be refreshed. All users connect back to the UK over VPN to the central office and server.
The client has purchased already a server with 2012 Essentials license my concern here is how to integrate that with the existing network. My initial research was showing that 2012 Essentials either wanted to be the Domain Controller or would setup/configure AS a Domain controller. As such moving from a 2003 domain to 2012 would add an huge licensing cost from a user Cal point of view, and the fact they have over 200 user accounts.
The next article i found was:
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10-things/10-cool-new-features-in-windows-server-2012-r2-essentials/
I wanted to be sure that this could and would integrate as only a member Server now.
Any Advice would be appreciated.
Carl
Either you need to transition it to windows 2012 standard edition, but then still you need to purchase 2012 standard CALs
OR
As stated in link you could get 2012 R2 standard edition and add 2012 R2 VM (You will get 2 VM instance free with windows 2012 \ 2012 R2 standard edition) and install 2012 R2 essentials as role and use it as member server
However in any case you need to purchase windows 2012 R2 standard edition license and user \ device CALs for 2012 R2 server
Mahesh