Summary

I said it in previous versions of this book, and I’ll say it again now—writing this chapter has been exactly the (re)-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, have worked through the exercises in this book numerous times, and I have even supported a handful of them in customer environments to a limited extent. But I have never attempted to change my default mindset when spinning up new servers within production environments that I support. Now that tools such as Sconfig and the new Windows Admin Center are available to us, we have officially run out of excuses as to why we shouldn’t at least consider using Server Core for new instances of Windows Server in our environments. In fact, as I was building out the new DC3-CORE server, I realized just how much faster it is to get a Server Core instance off the ground compared to...