Summary

I have to be honest with you—writing this chapter has been exactly the kick in the pants that I needed to start thinking about shrinking my own servers. I am in the same boat as many of you: I know what Server Core is and have played around with it but have never taken the steps to really use it in the production environments that I support. Now that tools such as Sconfig and the new Windows Admin Center are available to us, I have officially run out of excuses as to why I shouldn't be deploying new roles onto Server Core boxes. In fact, as I was building out the new DC3 server, I realized just how much faster it is to get a Server Core instance off the ground compared to the full graphical interface. Reboots are faster and using Sconfig to set the IP address, hostname, and domain membership all took me about 2 minutes in total.

While it never hurts to learn something new, using Server Core no longer comes with the requirement that you must be fluent in PowerShell...