This post was written by Perumal raja. Send your suggestions or comments toWinServerBlogs@dell.com.
When you order a Microsoft Windows Server from Dell with a Microsoft Server OS factory installed in it, the sales representative or online order page gives you the option to select from three partitioning options as 40GB, 80GB and Max partition (This will create OS partition of full disk). This provides limited options to choose from. Also, an organization’s order might be created by a sales/Procurement engineer of the organization who might not have the exact specs required in the datacenter’s operating environment.
To provide a better customer experience and allow IT administrators to have flexible choices around the OS partition size, we have introduced a GUI tool which allows administrators to define the OS partition size at first boot (OOBE) experience. With this tool, OS partition size choices at the time of ordering the system will not be required, which simplifies the order creation for the Sales/Procurement engineer.
Fig: 1
This tool will query the OS at first boot to provide Minimum and Maximum partition size for an OS partition and allow the administrator to choose the size for the OS partition using a sliding bar. The tool will also provide information to consider in choosing the most appropriate partition size. Once an administrator provides the partition size, tool will re-size the OS partition and rest of the space in the hard disk will be converted as a Data partition. This feature is currently supported on OEM Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2.