Download code from GitHub
Installing and Managing Windows Server 2019
Now that we have taken a look at some of the features inside the graphical interface of Windows Server 2019, I realize that some of you may be sitting back thinking That's great to read about, but how do I really get started playing around with this for myself? Reading about technology is never as good as experiencing it for yourself, so we want some rubber to meet the road in this chapter. One of the biggest goals of this book is to make sure we enable you to use the product. Rattling off facts about new features and efficiencies is fine and dandy, but ultimately worthless if you aren't able to make it work in real life. So, let's make this chunk of raw server metal do some work for us.
In this chapter, we will be covering the following:
- Requirements for installation
- Installing Windows Server 2019
- Installing roles and...
Technical requirements
When planning the build of a new server, many of the decisions that you need to make reflect licensing-type decisions. What roles do you intend to install on this server? Can Server 2019 Standard handle it, or do we need Datacenter Edition for this guy? Is Server Core going to be beneficial from a security perspective, or do we need the full Desktop Experience? In these days of Hyper-V servers with the ability to spin up virtual machines on a whim, we oftentimes proceed without much consideration of the hardware of a server, but there are certainly still instances where physical equipment will be hosting the Windows Server 2019 operating system. In these cases you need to be aware of the requirements for this new platform, so let us take a minute to list out those specifics. This information is available in longer form on the Microsoft Docs website if you...
Installing Windows Server 2019
The installation process for Microsoft operating systems in general has improved dramatically over the past 15 years. I assume that a lot of you,, as IT professionals, are also the de facto neighborhood computer guy, being constantly asked by friends and family to fix or rebuild their computers. If you're anything like me, this means you are still occasionally rebuilding operating systems such as Windows XP. Looking at the bright blue setup screens and finding a keyboard with the F8 key are imperative to this process. To spend 2 hours simply installing the base operating system and bringing it up to the highest service pack level is pretty normal. Compared to that timeline, installation of a modern operating system such as Windows Server 2019 is almost unbelievably fast and simple.
It is very likely that the majority of readers have completed...
Installing roles and features
Installing the operating system gets your foot in the door, so to speak, using your server as a server. However, you can't actually do anything useful with your server at this point. On a client desktop system, the base operating system is generally all that is needed in order to start working and consuming data. The server's job is to serve up that data in the first place, and, until you tell the server what its purpose is in life, there really isn't anything useful happening in that base operating system. This is where we need to utilize roles and features. Windows Server 2019 contains many different options for roles. A role is just what the name implies: the installation of a particular role onto a server defines that server's role in the network. In other words, a role gives a server some purpose in life. A feature, on the...
Centralized management and monitoring
Whether you are installing new roles, running backups and maintenance programs, or troubleshooting and repairing a server, it makes common sense that you would log into the specific server that you will be working on. Long ago this meant walking up to the server itself and logging on with the keyboard and mouse which were plugged right into that hardware. Then, quite a number of years ago, this became cumbersome and technology advanced to the point where we now had the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) available to us. We quickly transitioned over to log into our servers remotely using RDP. Even though it's been around for many years, RDP is still an incredibly powerful and secure protocol, giving us the ability to quickly connect to servers from the comfort of our desk. And, as long as you have proper network topology and routing in place...
Windows Admin Center (WAC)
Now forget everything I just told you about remote server management, and focus here instead. I'm just kidding, sort of. All of the tools we have already discussed are still stable, relevant, and great ways to interact with and manage your bunches of Windows Servers. However, there's a new kid in town, and Microsoft expects him to be very popular.
Windows Admin Center (WAC) is a server and client management platform that is designed to help you administer your machines in a more efficient manner. This is a browser-based tool, meaning that, once installed, you access WAC from a web browser, which is great. No need to install a management tool or application onto your workstation, simply sit down and tap into it with a URL.
WAC can manage your servers (all the way back to Server 2008 R2), your server clusters, and even has some special functionality...
Enabling quick server rollouts with Sysprep
At the beginning of this chapter, we walked through the process for installing the Windows Server 2019 operating system onto your new server. Whether this was a physical piece of hardware or a virtual machine that we were working with, the installation process was essentially the same. Plugging in the DVD or USB stick, booting to it, and letting the installer run its course is an easy enough thing to do, but what if you need to build out ten new servers instead of just one? This process would soon start to get tedious, and it would seem like you were wasting a lot of time having to do the exact same thing over and over again. You would be correct, this does waste a lot of time, and there is an easier and faster way to roll out new servers as long as you are building them all from a relatively similar hardware platform. If you are building...
Summary
Anyone interested in being a Windows Server administrator needs to be comfortable with installing and managing their servers, and covering those topics establishes an important baseline for moving forward. It is quite common in today's IT world for new operating system releases to be thoroughly tested, both because server hardware resources are so easily available to us through virtualization technologies, and because most business systems are now being designed for 100% uptime. This kind of reliability requires very thorough testing of any platform changes, and, in order to accomplish such testing of the Windows Server 2019 operating system in your environment, you will be burning quite a bit of time spinning through the basic installation processes numerous times. I hope that you can put the suggestions provided in this chapter to good use in saving you precious...
Questions
- What is the name of the new web-based, centralized server management tool from Microsoft (formerly known as Project Honolulu)?
- True or False—Windows Server 2019 needs to be installed onto rack-mount server hardware.
- True or False—By choosing the default installation option for Windows Server 2019, you will end up with a user interface that looks quite like Windows 10.
- What is the PowerShell cmdlet that displays currently installed roles and features in Windows Server 2019?
- True or False—Server Manager can be used to manage many different servers at the same time?
- What is the name of the toolset that can be installed onto a Windows 10 computer, in order to run Server Manager on that client workstation?
- What are the supported web browsers that can be used to interact with Windows Admin Center?
