Windows Server 2016 Datacenter - Killing the bloat

[ViscountStyx]

Hi Guys,

 

I've started myself off on a little challenge - was wondering if anyone wanted to weigh in with suggestions / scores that beat mine

 

I'm essentially trying to script a de-bloating of Windows Server 2016 Datacenter edition.  With Microsoft's per-core charging policy now, the possibility is there to spread the work across multiple machines - the only kicker is the default memory usage.

 

As a baseline, I've used a VMWare virtual machine with:

 

4 CPU Cores (to ensure that's not a bottleneck)

4 GB RAM (to ensure no pagefile schenanigans

40GB Disk space

 

And the default RAM usage when RDP'ed to the machine:

1.5GB/4GB!  Ooof!

Attached baseline screenshot of what Task Manager reports as the usage.

 

So I did some pruning.

 

Using powershell / dism I removed:

 

RSAT (remote server administration tools)

Internet-Explorer-Optional (Because it's not 2008)

WindowsMediaPlayer (........server right?)

ServerCore-WOW64 (32bit application support, because.)

Microsoft-Windows-Printing-XPSServices-Package

Printing-XPSServices-Features

ServerCore-Drivers-General-WOW64 (32bit driver support)

Windows-Defender-Gui

Windows-Defender-Features

Windows-Defender

WindowsServerBackup

 

I also disabled the Scheduled task for Server Manager (which saves 300MB!)

I've then set the performance settings to prioritise programs over background services.

 

And we're down to:

 

0.9GB (attached)

 

It's amazing how much is loaded into the RAM.  Can anyone beat 0.9GB with a little pagefile usage as possible, or have any ideas to reduce this further, whilst leaving this as a workable server?

 

The plan is - to make this into a powershell script to streamline the machine if I need to rebuild.

 

Cheers!

 

Before:

After:

 

 

PS - No windows updates were processing and increasing the RAM size on first use - machine was fully updated.

[jj9987]

You might be interested in /r/PowerShell as they also share useful scripts and knowledge.