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Mastering windows server 2012 pdf download
1, Pages·· MB·77, Downloads·New! Video Resources; Exam Essentials; Review Questions; Chapter 7 Configuring Windows Containers; Understanding. Thank you extremely much for downloading mastering windows server pdf. WebMicrosoft – Windows Server Installing and Configuring Windows.
Mastering Windows Server R2 Book Pdf Download.دانلود کتاب Mastering windows server
Mastering Windows Server — Second Edition mastering windows server 2012 pdf download all of the essential information needed to implement and utilize this latest-and-greatest platform as the core of your data center computing needs. You will begin by installing and managing Windows Serverand by clearing up common points of confusion surrounding the versions mastering windows server 2012 pdf download licensing of this new product.
Centralized management, monitoring, and configuration of servers is key to mastering windows server 2012 pdf download efficient Идея download rpcdump tool хорошие department, and you will discover multiple methods for quickly managing all of your servers from a single pane of glass.
Even though this book is focused on Windows Server LTSC, we адрес still discuss containers and Nano Server, which are more commonly related to the SAC channel of the server platform, for a well-rounded exposition of all aspects of using Windows Server in your environment.
We also discuss the various remote mastering windows server 2012 pdf download technologies available in this operating system, as well as guidelines for virtualizing your data center with Hyper-V. By the end of this book, you will have all the ammunition required to start planning for, implementing, and managing Windows. About mastering windows server 2012 pdf download years ago, Microsoft adjusted its operating system release ideology so that the latest Windows Server operating system is always structured very similarly to the latest Windows client operating system.
This has been the trend for some time now, with Server R2 closely reflecting Windows mastering windows server 2012 pdf download, Server feeling a lot like Windows 8, and many of the same usability features that came with the Windows 8. This, of course, carried over to Server as well—giving it the same look mastering windows server 2012 pdf download feel as if you were logged into a Windows 10 workstation.
Now that we are all familiar mastering windows server 2012 pdf download comfortable with the Windows 10 interface, we typically have no problems jumping right into the Server interface and giving it a test drive.
Windows Server is once again mastering windows server 2012 pdf download exception to this rule, except that the release of client-side operating systems has shifted a little bit. Now, instead of releasing new versions of Windows 11, 12, 13, and so onwe are, for the time being, simply sticking with Windows 10 and giving it sub-version numbers, indicative of the dates when that operating system was released. For example, Windows 10 version released around March of Windows 10 version was released in September of Then, we have had and as well—although was delayed a little and didn’t абсолютно download inazuma eleven strikers 2012 xtreme pc iso пожалуйста until somewhere closer to November, but that wasn’t the original plan.
The current plan is Windows OS releases every six months or so, but expecting IT departments mastering windows server 2012 pdf download lift and shift all of their servers just for the purposes of moving to an OS that is six months newer is crazy; sometimes it takes longer than that just to plan a migration.
Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself a little, as we will be discussing versioning of Windows Server later in this chapter, during our Windows Server versions and licensing section. The point here is that Windows Server looks and feels like the latest version of the Windows client operating system that was released at about the same time—that OS being Windows 10 Before we get started talking about the features of Windows Server, it is important to establish a baseline for usability and familiarity in the operating mastering windows server 2012 pdf download itself before diving deeper into the technologies running under the hood.
Let’s spend a few minutes exploring the new graphical interface and options that are available for finding your way around this latest release of Windows Server, with a view to covering the following topics in this chapter:.
Is asking what the purpose of Windows Server a silly question? I don’t think so. It’s a good question to ponder, especially now that the definition for servers and server workloads is changing on a regular basis.
The answer to this question for Windows clients is simpler. A Windows client machine is a requester, consumer, and contributor of data. From where is this data being pushed and pulled? What enables the mechanisms and applications running on the client operating systems to interface with this data? What secures these users and their data? The answers to these questions reveal the purpose of servers in general.
They house, protect, and serve up the data to be consumed by clients. Everything revolves around data in business today. Our email, documents, databases, customer lists—everything that we need to do business well, is data. That data is critical to us. Servers are what we use to build the fabric upon which we trust our посмейте ccleaner download kostenlos windows 10 ответ to reside.
We traditionally think about servers using a client-server interface mentality. A user opens a program on their client computer, this program reaches out to a server in order to retrieve something, and the server responds as needed. This idea can be correctly applied to just about every transaction you may have with a server. When your domain-joined computer needs to authenticate you as a user, it reaches out to Active Directory on the server to validate your credentials and get an authentication token.
When you need to contact a resource by name, your computer asks a DNS server how to get there. If you need to open a file, you ask the file server to send it your way. Servers are designed to be the brains of our operation, and often by doing so transparently. In recent years, large strides have been taken to ensure resources are always available and accessible in sailor moon pc engine download that don’t require training or a large effort on the part of our employees.
In most organizations, many mastering windows server 2012 pdf download servers are needed in order to provide your workforce with the capabilities they require. Each service inside Windows Server is provided as, or as part of, game pc dengan mudah role.
When you talk about needing new servers or configuring a new server for any particular task, what you are really referring to is the individual role or roles that are going to be configured on that server in order to get the work done. A server without any roles installed is useless, though depending on the chassis, can make an excellent paperweight. A 3U SAN device could weigh upwards of pounds and keep your desk orderly even in the middle of a hurricane!
If you think of roles as the meat and potatoes of a server, then the next bit we will discuss is sort of like adding salt and pepper. Beyond the overhead roles you will install and configure on your servers, Windows also contains many features that can be installed, which sometimes stand alone, but more often complement specific roles in the operating system.
Features may be something that complement and add functionality to the base operating system such as Telnet Clientor a feature may be added to a server in order to enhance an existing role, such as adding the Network Load Balancing feature to an already-equipped remote access or IIS server. The combination of roles and features inside Windows Server is what equips that piece of metal to do work. This mastering windows server 2012 pdf download will, quite obviously, focus on a Microsoft-centric infrastructure.
In these environments, Windows Server operating system is king, and is prevalent across all facets of technology. There are alternatives to Windows Server, and different products which can provide some of the same functions to an organization, but it is quite rare to find a business environment anywhere that is running without some semblance of a Microsoft infrastructure.
Windows Mastering windows server 2012 pdf download contains an incredible amount of technology, all wrapped up in one small installation disk. With Windows ServerMicrosoft has gotten us thinking out of the box about what it means to be a server in the first place, and comes with some exciting new capabilities that mastering windows server 2012 pdf download will spend some time covering in these pages.
Things such as PowerShell, Windows Admin Center, and Storage Spaces Direct are changing the way that we manage and size our computing environments; these are exciting times to be or to become a server administrator!
There’s this new term out there, you may have even heard of it While the word “cloud” has certainly turned into a buzzword that is often misused and spoken of inappropriately, the idea of cloud infrastructure is an incredibly powerful one. A cloud fabric is one that revolves around virtual resources—virtual machines, virtual disks, and even virtual networks. Being plugged into the cloud typically enables things like the ability to spin up new servers on a whim, or even the ability for particular services themselves to increase or decrease their needed resources automatically, based on utilization.
Think of a simple e-commerce website where a consumer can go to order goods. Prior to cloud mentality, this would mean that the company would need to size their environment to fit the maximum requirements all the time, in case it was ever needed. They would be paying for more servers and much more computing power than was needed for the majority of the year.
With a cloud fabric, giving the website the ability to increase or decrease the number of servers it has at its disposal as needed, the total cost of such a website or service can be drastically decreased. This mastering windows server 2012 pdf download a major driving factor of cloud страница business today.
Most of the time, when your neighbor Suzzi Knowitall talks to you about the cloud, she is simply talking about the internet. Well, more accurately she is talking about some service that she uses, which she connects to by using the internet. For example, OfficeGoogle Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox—these are all public cloud resources, as they are storing your data in the cloud.
In reality, your data is just sitting on servers which you access via the internet, but you can’t see those servers and you don’t have to administer and maintain those servers, which is why it feels like magic and is then referred to as the cloud.
To IT departments, the term “cloud” more often means one of the big three cloud hosting providers. Since this is a Microsoft-driven book, and since I truly feel this way anyway, Azure is top-notch in this category.
Azure itself is another topic for another or many other book, but is a centralized cloud compute architecture that can host your data, your services, or even your entire network of servers. Moving your datacenter to Azure enables you to stop worrying or caring about server hardware, replacing hard drives, and much more.
Rather than purchasing servers, unboxing them, racking them, installing Windows on them, and then setting up the roles you want configured, you simply click a few buttons to spin up new virtual servers that can be resized at any time for growth. You then pay smaller op-ex costs for these servers—monthly or annual fees for running systems inside the cloud, rather than the big cap-ex costs for server hardware in the first place. As far as enterprise is concerned, Azure simply takes the cake and eats it too.
I’m not sure that the others will ever be able to catch up with all of the changes and updates that Microsoft constantly makes to the Azure infrastructure.
While most people working in the IT sector these days have a pretty good understanding of what it means to be part of a cloud service, and many are indeed doing so today, a term which is being pushed into enterprises everywhere and is still many times misunderstood is private cloud. At first, I took this to be a silly marketing ploy, a gross misuse of the term “cloud” to try and appeal to those hooked by buzzwords. Boy was I wrong. In the early days of private clouds, the technology wasn’t quite ready to stand up to what was being advertised.
Today, however, that story has changed. It is now entirely possible to take the same fabric that is running up in the true, public cloud, and install that fabric right inside your data center.
This enables you to provide your company with cloud benefits such as the ability to spin resources up and down, and to больше на странице everything virtualized, and to implement all of the neat tips and tricks of cloud environments, with all of the serving power and data storage remaining locally owned and secured by you.
Trusting cloud storage companies to keep data safe and secure is absolutely one of the biggest blockers to implementation on the true public cloud, but, by installing your own private cloud, you get the best of both worlds, specifically stretchable compute environments with the security of knowing you still control and own all of your own data.
This is not a book about clouds, public or private. I mention this to http://replace.me/6848.txt a baseline for some of the items we will discuss in later chapters, and also to get your mouth watering a little bit to dig in and do a little reading yourself on cloud technology.
You will see Windows Server interface in many new mastering windows server 2012 pdf download with the cloud, and will notice that so many of the underlying systems available in Server are similar to, if not the same as, those becoming available inside Microsoft Azure.
In these pages, we will not focus on the capabilities of Azure, but rather a more traditional sense of Windows Server that would be utilized on-premise. With the big push toward cloud technologies, it’s easy to get caught with blinders on and think that everything and everyone is quickly running to the cloud for all of their technology needs, but it simply isn’t true.
Most companies will have the need for many on-premise servers for many years to come; in fact, many may never put full trust in the cloud and will forever maintain their own data centers. These data centers will have local servers that will require server administrators to manage them. That is where you come in. Anyone who has worked with the design or installation of a Windows Server in recent years is probably wondering which direction we are taking within this book.
You see, there are different capability editions, different technical versions, plus different licensing models of Windows Server. Let’s take a few minutes to cover those differences so that you can have a well-rounded knowledge of the different options, and so that we can define which portions we plan to discuss over the course of this book.
When installing the Windows Server operating system onto a нажмите чтобы прочитать больше of hardware, as you will experience in Chapter 2Installing and Managing Windows Serveryou will have two different choices on server capability. Windows 10 november first is Server Standard, which is the default option and one that includes most of your traditional Windows Server roles.
Introducing Windows Server R2 [Book]
Prior to cloud mentality, this would mean that the company would need to size their environment to fit the maximum requirements all the time, in case it was ever needed.
They would be paying for more servers and much more computing power than was needed for the majority of the year. With a cloud fabric, giving the website the ability to increase or decrease the number of servers it has at its disposal as needed, the total cost of such a website or service can be drastically decreased. This is a major driving factor of cloud in business today. Most of the time, when your neighbor Suzzi Knowitall talks to you about the cloud, she is simply talking about the internet.
Well, more accurately she is talking about some service that she uses, which she connects to by using the internet. For example, Office , Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox—these are all public cloud resources, as they are storing your data in the cloud. In reality, your data is just sitting on servers which you access via the internet, but you can’t see those servers and you don’t have to administer and maintain those servers, which is why it feels like magic and is then referred to as the cloud.
To IT departments, the term “cloud” more often means one of the big three cloud hosting providers. Since this is a Microsoft-driven book, and since I truly feel this way anyway, Azure is top-notch in this category.
Azure itself is another topic for another or many other book, but is a centralized cloud compute architecture that can host your data, your services, or even your entire network of servers. Moving your datacenter to Azure enables you to stop worrying or caring about server hardware, replacing hard drives, and much more.
Rather than purchasing servers, unboxing them, racking them, installing Windows on them, and then setting up the roles you want configured, you simply click a few buttons to spin up new virtual servers that can be resized at any time for growth.
You then pay smaller op-ex costs for these servers—monthly or annual fees for running systems inside the cloud, rather than the big cap-ex costs for server hardware in the first place. As far as enterprise is concerned, Azure simply takes the cake and eats it too. I’m not sure that the others will ever be able to catch up with all of the changes and updates that Microsoft constantly makes to the Azure infrastructure. While most people working in the IT sector these days have a pretty good understanding of what it means to be part of a cloud service, and many are indeed doing so today, a term which is being pushed into enterprises everywhere and is still many times misunderstood is private cloud.
At first, I took this to be a silly marketing ploy, a gross misuse of the term “cloud” to try and appeal to those hooked by buzzwords. Boy was I wrong. In the early days of private clouds, the technology wasn’t quite ready to stand up to what was being advertised.
Today, however, that story has changed. It is now entirely possible to take the same fabric that is running up in the true, public cloud, and install that fabric right inside your data center. This enables you to provide your company with cloud benefits such as the ability to spin resources up and down, and to run everything virtualized, and to implement all of the neat tips and tricks of cloud environments, with all of the serving power and data storage remaining locally owned and secured by you.
Trusting cloud storage companies to keep data safe and secure is absolutely one of the biggest blockers to implementation on the true public cloud, but, by installing your own private cloud, you get the best of both worlds, specifically stretchable compute environments with the security of knowing you still control and own all of your own data.
This is not a book about clouds, public or private. I mention this to give a baseline for some of the items we will discuss in later chapters, and also to get your mouth watering a little bit to dig in and do a little reading yourself on cloud technology.
You will see Windows Server interface in many new ways with the cloud, and will notice that so many of the underlying systems available in Server are similar to, if not the same as, those becoming available inside Microsoft Azure. In these pages, we will not focus on the capabilities of Azure, but rather a more traditional sense of Windows Server that would be utilized on-premise. With the big push toward cloud technologies, it’s easy to get caught with blinders on and think that everything and everyone is quickly running to the cloud for all of their technology needs, but it simply isn’t true.
Most companies will have the need for many on-premise servers for many years to come; in fact, many may never put full trust in the cloud and will forever maintain their own data centers. These data centers will have local servers that will require server administrators to manage them. That is where you come in. Anyone who has worked with the design or installation of a Windows Server in recent years is probably wondering which direction we are taking within this book.
You see, there are different capability editions, different technical versions, plus different licensing models of Windows Server. Let’s take a few minutes to cover those differences so that you can have a well-rounded knowledge of the different options, and so that we can define which portions we plan to discuss over the course of this book.
When installing the Windows Server operating system onto a piece of hardware, as you will experience in Chapter 2 , Installing and Managing Windows Server , you will have two different choices on server capability. The first is Server Standard, which is the default option and one that includes most of your traditional Windows Server roles. While I cannot give you details on pricing because that could potentially be different for every company depending on your agreements with Microsoft, Standard is the cheaper option and is used most commonly for installations of Windows Server Datacenter, on the other hand, is the luxury model.
There are some roles and features within Windows Server that only work with the Datacenter version of the operating system, and they are not available inside Standard. If ever you are looking to a new piece of Microsoft technology to serve a purpose in your environment, make sure to check over the requirements to find out whether you will have to build a Datacenter server.
Keep in mind that Datacenter can cost significantly more money than Standard, so you generally only use it in places where it is actually required. For example, if you are interested in hosting Shielded VMs or working with Storage Spaces Direct, you will be required to run the Server Datacenter edition on the servers related to those technologies.
One of the biggest functional differences between Standard and Datacenter is the number of virtual machines VMs that they can host. Server Standard can only run two VMs on it at any given time, which is a pretty limiting factor if you were looking to build out a Hyper-V server. Datacenter allows you to run unlimited numbers of VMs, which makes it a no-brainer when building your virtualization host servers.
For running Hyper-V, Datacenter is the way to go. Next up are the different footprints and user interfaces that you can run on your Windows Server machines. There are three different versions of Windows Server that can be used, and the correct one for you depends on what capabilities and security you are looking for. This is the most common choice among Windows Servers everywhere. Whether you are building a Windows Server Standard or Datacenter, you have a choice of running Server with or without a graphical user interface.
The traditional look and feel, point-and-click interface is called Desktop Experience. This allows things such as RDPing into your servers, having a traditional desktop, being able to use the graphical Server Manager right from your logged-in server, and all in all is the best way to go if you are new to server administration. If you are familiar with navigating around inside Windows 10, then you should be able to at least make your way around in Windows Server running Desktop Experience.
This is the version of Windows Server that we will be focusing on for the majority of this book, and almost all of the screenshots will be taken from within a Desktop Experience environment. As you will see when we install Windows Server together, the default option for installation is not Desktop Experience. What this means is that choosing the default install path would instead place a headless version of Windows Server onto your machine, most commonly referred to as Server Core.
The nature of being headless makes Server Core faster and more efficient than Desktop Version, which makes sense because it doesn’t have to run all of that extra code and consume all of those extra resources for launching and displaying a huge graphical interface.
Almost anything that you want to do within Windows Server is possible to do on either Server Core or Desktop Experience, the main differences being interface and security. To be able to use Server Core, you definitely have to be comfortable with a command-line interface namely PowerShell , and you also have to consider remote server management to be a reliable way of interacting with your servers.
The largest benefit that Server Core brings to the table, other than performance, is security. Since those things aren’t even running inside Server Core—alas, you couldn’t get to a desktop even if you wanted to—attacks against Server Core machines are much, much less successful.
A third platform for Windows Server does exist, known as Nano Server. This is a tiny version of Windows Server, headless like Server Core but running an even smaller footprint. The last time I booted up a Nano Server, it consumed less than MB of data for the complete operating system, which is incredible.
It seemed like Nano Server was discussed much more surrounding the release of Server , because at that time Microsoft was pressing forward with plans to include a whole bunch of roles inside Nano Server so that we could start replacing some of our bloated, oversized everyday servers with Nano, but that mentality has since gone by the wayside.
As of this writing, Nano Server is pretty well married to the use of containers. In fact, I believe the only supported way to run Nano Server right now is to run it as an image inside a container. We will discuss both in more detail inside Chapter 11 , Containers and Nano Server , but, for the purposes of this summary, it is safe to say that, if you know what containers are, and are interested in using them, then you will benefit from learning all there is to know about Nano Server.
If you are not in a position to work with containers, you will probably never run into Nano Server in your environment. There are two different paths that you can take. It is possible to have a mix of these in a single environment, if you have need for both. If you opt to run SAC releases of Windows Server, your naming convention for the operating system changes.
Rather than calling it Server , you are really running Windows Server , , and so on. It follows the same mentality that Windows 10 does. What that implies is that these new versions of Windows Server SAC are released at much shorter intervals than we have ever seen for servers in the past.
The SAC channel is planned to receive two major releases every year—generally in the spring and the fall. Because of the fast release cadence, support for SAC versions of Windows Server lasts for a short 18 months. If you use SAC, you had better get used to always jumping on the latest version shortly after it releases.
If swapping out your server operating systems twice a year sounds daunting, you’re not alone. Thankfully, Microsoft recognizes this and realizes that the general server administrator population is not going to use this model for their regular, everyday servers. In this new world of flexible application hosting, where applications are being written in ways that the infrastructure resources behind those applications can be spun up or spun down as needed, containers are a very important piece of that DevOps puzzle.
If you host or build these kinds of applications, you will almost certainly be using containers—now or in the future. When you find yourself in the position of researching and figuring out containers, you will then probably find that the best way to accomplish a highly-performant container environment is by hosting it on SAC server releases. While you can go with either and people will generally know what you are talking about, LTSC is now the proper term.
Essentially, LTSC releases are what we have always thought of as our traditional Windows Server operating system releases. What has changed is that the LTSC releases will now be coming with fewer things that are wow, that’s so awesome and brand-new , because we will be seeing and getting hints about those brand new things as they are created and rolled out in a more short-term fashion through the SAC releases. So, your SAC releases will come out roughly every six months, and then every two to three years we will experience a new LTSC release that rolls up all of those changes.
You wouldn’t want to install a domain controller, certificate server, or file server and have to replace that server every six months. So, for any of these scenarios, you will always look to LTSC. One other major difference between the two is that, if you want to use the Desktop Experience version of Windows Server having a graphical interface to interact with —then you’re looking at LTSC. With LTSC versions of Windows Server, you continue to get the same support we are used to: five years of mainstream support followed by five years of available extended support.
The newest version of the Windows Server operating system is always an evolution of its predecessor. There are certainly pieces of technology contained inside that are brand new, but there are even more places where existing technologies have been updated to include new features and functionality.
Let’s spend a few minutes providing an overview of some of the new capabilities that exist in Windows Server Historically, a new release of any Microsoft operating system has meant learning a new user interface, but Server is the first exception to this rule.
Windows 10’s release gave us the first look at the current graphical platform, which then rolled into Windows Server , and that was the first time we had seen the current interface on a server platform. Now that Windows 10 updates are releasing but continuing on with essentially the same desktop interface, the same is true for Server Logging in and using Windows Server is, in a lot of ways, the same experience that you have had inside Windows Server Even so, some reading this book have never experienced logging into a server of any kind before, and so we will certainly be looking over that interface, and learning some tips and tricks for navigating around smoothly and efficiently within Server When you see the phrase Hyper-Converged Infrastructure HCI , it is important to understand that we are not talking about a specific technology that exists within your server environment.
Rather, HCI is a culmination of a number of different technologies that can work together and be managed together, all for the purposes of creating the mentality of a Software-Defined Datacenter SDDC as it is sometimes referred to. Clustering these services together enables some big speed and reliability benefits over hosting these roles separately, and on their own systems.
Similar to how compute virtualization platforms like Hyper-V completely changed the landscape of what server computing looked like ten or so years ago, we are now finding ourselves capable of lifting the network layer away from physical hardware, and shifting the design and administration of our networks to be virtual, and managed by Windows Server platform. Finally releasing in an official capacity, WAC is one of the coolest things I’ve seen yet as part of the Server release.
This is a free tool, available to anyone, that you can use to start centrally managing your server infrastructure. While not fully capable of replacing all of the traditional PowerShell, RDP, and MMC console administration tools, it enables you to do a lot of normal everyday tasks with your servers, all from a single interface.
If this capability sounds at all familiar to you, it may be because you tested something called Project Honolulu at some point over the past year. While it is true that Windows Server does come out of the box with built-in antivirus, the ATP service is much, much more.
We’ll discuss it in more depth in Chapter 7 , Hardening and Security , but the short summary is that Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection is a cloud-based service that you tap your machines into. The power of ATP is that many thousands, or perhaps even millions, of devices are submitting data and creating an enormous information store that can then be used with some AI and machine learning to generate comprehensive data about new threats, viruses, and intrusions, in real time.
ATP customers then receive the benefits of protection as those new threats arise. It’s almost like crowd-sourced anti-threat capabilities, with Azure handling all of the backend processing. Active Directory has stored all of our user account information, including passwords, for many years. The last few releases of Windows Server operating system have not included many updates or new features within AD, but Microsoft is now working with many customers inside their cloud-based Azure AD environment, and new features are always being worked on in the cloud.
Banned Passwords is one of those things. Natively an Azure AD capability, it can now be synchronized back to your on-premise domain controller servers, giving you the ability to create a list of passwords that cannot be used in any fashion by your users. For example, the word password.
By banning password as a password, you effectively ban any password that includes the word password. For example, P ssword, Password! The ability to perform a soft restart was actually new with Server , but it had to be manually added into Server and I don’t think anybody really ever started using it. In the past three years, I have never seen a single person initiate a soft restart, so I assume it is not well-known and I will include it here in our list of features.
In an effort to speed up reboots, there is an optional reboot switch called soft restart, which is now included automatically inside Server So, what is a soft restart?
It is a restart without hardware initialization. In other words, it restarts the operating system without restarting the whole machine. It is invoked during a restart by adding a special switch to the shutdown command. Interestingly, in Server you could also invoke a soft restart with the Restart-Computer cmdlet in PowerShell, but that option seems to have fallen away in Server So, if you want to speed up your reboots, you’ll have to turn back to good old Command Prompt, as seen in the following:.
Under whose authority did I type the word Linux inside a book about Windows Server?! Historically, corporate computing environments have run Windows, or they have run Linux, or maybe they have run both but with a very clear separation between the two. Windows Server blurs that line of separation. We now have the ability to run Linux VMs within our Microsoft Hyper-V, and to even be able to interface with them properly. Did you know some Linux operating systems actually know how to interact with a mouse?
Before now, you didn’t have much chance of that when trying to run a Linux-based VM on top of a Windows Server, but we now have some compatibility implemented in Hyper-V. Linux-based containers can also be run on top of Server , which is a big deal for anyone looking to implement scaling applications via containers. You can even protect your Linux virtual machines by encrypting them, through the use of Shielded Virtual Machines! So many companies are running a majority of their servers as virtual machines today.
One of the big problems with this is that there are some inherent security loopholes that exist in the virtualization host platforms of today.
One of those holes is backdoor access to the hard disk files of your virtual machines. It is quite easy for anyone with administrative rights on the virtual host to be able to see, modify, or break any virtual machine that is running within that host. And, these modifications can be made in almost untraceable ways.
Server brings some specific benefits to the Shielded VM world: we can now protect both Windows-based and Linux-based virtual machines by shielding them, and we are no longer so reliant on communication with the Host Guardian Service when trying to boot protected VMs from our Guarded Host servers. Hybrid Cloud—isn’t it great when you can take two separate buzzwords, and combine them to make an even larger and more powerful buzzword? Hybrid Cloud is the thing of CIO’s dreams.
I hope you know I am jesting on this; the idea of hybrid cloud is incredibly powerful and is the bridge which is making cloud utilization possible. We can have both on-premise servers, and servers hosted in Azure, and make it all one big happy network where you can access any resource from anywhere. Now, there are already a myriad of technologies that allow you to tap your local network into your Azure network—namely site-to-site VPNs and Azure Express Route. However another option never hurts, especially for small companies that don’t want the complexity of building a site-to-site VPN, nor the cost of Express Route.
Enter the Azure Network Adapter. This new capability allows you to very quickly and easily add a virtual network adapter to a Windows Server even one as far back as R2 , and then connect that virtual NIC straight to your Azure network!
Windows Admin Center is required for this transaction to take place; we will take a closer look in Chapter 5 , Networking with Windows Server Users hate launching VPN connections. I know this because I hear that kind of feedback every day. Having to manually make a connection to their work network is wasting time that they could otherwise spend doing actual work. In Chapter 6 , Enabling Your Mobile Workforce , we will discuss the different remote access technologies available inside Windows Server There are actually two different technologies that allow for a fully automatic connection back to the corporate network, where the users don’t have to take any manual action to enact those connections.
One of those technologies is DirectAccess and has been around since Server R2. We will detail DirectAccess because it is still a viable and popular connectivity option, and we will also cover the newest version of automated remote connectivity—Always On VPN.
Unfortunately, Microsoft turned a lot of people off with the introduction of Windows 8 and Server , not because functionality or reliability was lacking, but because the interface was so vastly different than it had been before. It was almost like running two separate operating systems at the same time. You had the normal desktop experience, in which all of us spent More likely, you stumbled into it without wanting to.
However you ended up there, inside that fullscreen tablet-like interface, for the remaining 0. I am, of course, speaking purely from experience here. There may be variations in your personal percentages of time spent, but, based on the conversations I have been involved with, I am not alone in these views. And, I haven’t even mentioned the magical self-appearing Charms bar.
Some bad memories are better left in the recesses of the brain. The major update of Windows 8. There was an actual Start button in the corner again, and you could choose to boot primarily into the normal desktop mode. However, should you ever have the need to click on that Start button, you found yourself right back in the full page Start screen, which I still find almost all server admins trying their best to avoid at all costs. Well, it turns out that Microsoft listened and brought some much-needed relief in Windows 10 and Windows Server While not quite back to the traditional Start menu that existed back in , we have a good mix of both old ways and new ways of launching the tools that we need to access on our server platforms.
As far as the graphical interface goes, Windows Server is mostly unchanged from Server , because we have not seen a major interface update on the client operating system. As you already know, each new version of Windows Server has received updates to the point-and-click interface based on what the latest Windows client operating system is at the time, and this is the first time in many years that a new server operating system has been released while the client operating system is still hanging out on the same version—Windows If you are comfortable navigating around in Windows 10, you will be well-suited to Windows Server For anyone who is new to working within Windows, or is just looking for some tips and tricks to get you rolling, this section is for you.
As sub-versions of Windows 10 have been released, there have been small ongoing changes to the Start menu. All in all, I consider many of the changes to be backpedalling from the Windows 8 fiasco. We are now back to a real Start button that launches a real Start menu, one that doesn’t take over the entire desktop. To be honest, personally I almost never open the Start menu at all, other than to search for the application or feature that I want.
We will cover more on that very soon. However, when I do open up the Start menu and look at it, there are a few nice things that stand out. Now, that is a breath of fresh air. A simple but useful Start menu, and more importantly one that loads quickly over remote connections such as RDP or Hyper-V consoles.
As nice as it is to have a functional Start menu, as a server administrator I still very rarely find myself needing to access the traditional menu for my day-to-day functions. This is because many items that I need to access are quickly available to me inside the quick tasks menu, which opens by simply right-clicking on the Start button.
This menu has been available to us since the release of Windows 8, but many IT professionals are still unaware of this functionality. This menu has become an important part of my interaction with Windows Server operating systems, and hopefully it will be for you as well.
Right-clicking on the Start button shows us immediate quick links to do things like open the Event Viewer , view the System properties, check Device Manager , and even Shut down or Restart the server.
The two most common functions that I call for in this context menu are the Run function and using it to quickly launch a PowerShell prompt. Using this menu properly saves many mouse clicks and shortens troubleshooting time. While the Quick Admin menu hidden behind the Start button is useful for calling common administrative tasks, using the Search function inside the Start menu is a powerful tool for interfacing with literally anything on your Windows Server.
Depending on who installed applications and roles to your servers, you may or may not have shortcuts available to launch them inside the Start menu. You also may or may not have Desktop shortcuts, or links to open these programs from the taskbar. I find that it is often difficult to find specific settings that may need to be tweaked in order to make our servers run like we want them to. The Control Panel is slowly being replaced by the newer Settings menu in newer versions of Windows, and sometimes this results in the discovery of particular settings being difficult.
All of these troubles are alleviated with the search bar inside the Start menu. By simply clicking on the Start button, or even easier by pressing the Windows key WinKey on your keyboard, you can simply start typing the name of whatever program or setting or document that you want to open up.
The search bar will search everything on your local server, and present options to you for which application, setting, or even document, to open. As a most basic example, press WinKey on your keyboard, then type notepad and press the Enter key.
You will see that good old Notepad opens right up for us. We never had to navigate anywhere in the Programs folder in order to find and open it. In fact, we never even had to touch the mouse, which is music to the ears for someone like me who loves doing everything he possibly can via the keyboard:.
An even better example is to pick something that would be buried fairly deep inside Settings or the Control Panel. How about changing the amount of time before the screen goes to power save and turns itself off? The traditional server admin will open Control Panel if you can find it , probably navigate to the Appearance and Personalization section because nothing else looks obviously correct, and still not find what they were looking for.
After poking around for a few more minutes, they would start to think that Microsoft forgot to add in this setting altogether. But alas, these power settings are simply moved to a new container, and are no longer accessible through Control Panel at all.
We will discuss the new Settings screen momentarily in this chapter, but ultimately for the purposes of this example you are currently stuck at the point where you cannot find the setting you want to change. What is a quick solution? Press your WinKey to open the Start menu, and type monitor or power , or just about anything else that would relate to the setting you are looking for.
You see in the list of available options showing in the search menu one called Choose when to turn off the screen. Click on that, and you have found the setting you were looking for all along:. You will also notice that you have many more options on this Search screen than what you were originally searching for.
Search has provided me with many different items that I could accomplish, all relating to the word monitor that I typed in. I don’t know of a more powerful way to open applications or settings on Windows Server than using the search bar inside the Start menu.
Give it a try today! While Windows Server provides great searching capabilities so that launching hard-to-find applications is very easy, sometimes it’s easier to have quick shortcuts for commonly used items to be available with a single click, down in the traditional taskbar. Whether you have sought out a particular application by browsing manually through the Start menu, or have used the Search function to pull up the program that you want, you can simply right-click on the program and choose Pin to taskbar in order to stick a permanent shortcut to that application in the taskbar at the bottom of your screen.
Once you have done this, during future logins to your session on the server, your favorite and most-used applications will be waiting for you with a single click. As you can see in the following screenshot, you also have the ability to pin programs to the Start menu, which of course is another useful place from which to launch them regularly:.
Many readers will already be very familiar with the process of pinning programs to the taskbar, so let’s take it one step further to portray an additional function you may not be aware is available to you when you have applications pinned. We are all pretty familiar with right-clicking in any given area of a Windows operating system in order to do some more advanced functions. Small context menus displayed upon a right-click have existed since the mouse rolled off the assembly line.
We often right-click in order to copy text, copy documents, paste the same, or get into a deeper set of properties for a particular file or folder. Many day-to-day tasks are accomplished with that mouse button. What I want to take a minute to point out is that software makers, Microsoft and otherwise, have been adding even more right-click functionality into application launchers themselves, which makes it even more advantageous to have them close at hand, such as inside the taskbar.
The amount of functionality provided to you when right-clicking on an application in the taskbar differs depending on the application itself. Very simple stuff.
If I right-click again on the smaller menu option for Command Prompt, I have the ability to perform the same functions, but I could also get further into Properties , or Run as administrator.
So, I get a little more enhanced functionality the deeper I go:. However, with other programs you will see more results. And, the more you utilize your servers, the more data and options you will start to see in these right-click context menus. Two great examples are Notepad and the Remote Desktop Client. On my server, I have been working in a few text configuration files, and I have been using my server in order to jump into other servers to perform some remote tasks.
I have been doing this using the Remote Desktop Client. Add it now to start borrowing from the collection. The library card you previously added can’t be used to complete this action. Please add your card again, or add a different card. If you receive an error message, please contact your library for help.
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Learn more about possible network issues or contact support for more help. National Library Board Singapore. Search Search Search Browse menu. Sign in. Mastering Windows Server R2. Description Creators Details Check out the new Hyper-V, find new and easier ways to remotely connect back into the office, or learn all about Storage Spaces—these are just a few of the features in Windows Server R2 that are explained in this updated edition from Windows authority Mark Minasi and a team of Windows Server experts led by Kevin Greene.
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