Chapter 1, What's New in PowerShell and Windows Server, looks at some of the key new features in Windows Server 2016 and in the latest version of PowerShell.
Chapter 2, Implementing Nano Server, shows you how to set up and use Nano Server—a new server installation option for Windows Server 2016. Nano Server provides a great platform for running roles with a vastly reduced attack and patch surface.
Chapter 3, Managing Windows Updates, helps you get to grips with managing updates via Windows Update. With the importance of keeping all your Windows servers fully patched, managing WSUS is a key take in almost any size organization.
Chapter 4, Managing Printers, shows you how to manage printers, printer queues, and printer drivers, including deploying printers via Group Policy. This chapter also looks at branch office printing.
Chapter 5, Managing Server Backup, examines the use of Windows Server Backup and covers both backup (and restore) via cmdlet and via the console application. Windows Server Backup is a nice feature you can use either on its own in a small organization or to augment an enterprise wide third-party service.
Chapter 6, Managing Performance, shows you how to measure and monitor the performance of a server. There are several recipes that demonstrate how to get specific performance measurements and how to create graphs of performance for further analysis.
Chapter 7, Troubleshooting Windows Server 2016, looks at a number of aspects of both reactive and proactive troubleshooting. This includes getting events from the event log and forwarding event logs to a central server. This chapter also looks at the Best Practice Analyzer features baked into Windows Server.
Chapter 8, Managing Windows networking services, looks at various aspects of networking. Networks are today central to almost every organization and this chapter looks at a variety of network-related tasks, including looking at new ways (with PowerShell) to do old things, setting up DNS, DHCP, and Active directory, as well as building a multi-tier certificate authority infrastructure.
Chapter 9, Managing Network Shares, looks at sharing data between systems, including building a scaled out clustered file server based on iSCSI and using the DFS Namespace and DFS Replication features of Windows Server.
Chapter 10, Managing Internet Information Server, shows you how to conduct a variety of IIS-related tasks, including IIS installation and configuration, setting up SSL and managing cipher suites, as well as configuring Network Load Balancing.
Chapter 11, Managing Hyper-V, demonstrates the use of Hyper-V. This chapter shows you how to build and deploy VMs with Hyper-V. This includes nested Hyper-V running a Hyper-V VM inside another Hyper-V VM (which is useful for a number of scenarios).
Chapter 12, Managing Azure, looks at managing IaaS resources in Azure using PowerShell. To test the recipes in this chapter, you need access to Azure. This chapter describes how to get a trial subscription.
Chapter 13, Using Desired State Configuration, shows how to use this important feature to ensure a server is setup correctly and continues to remain so. This covers setting up a pull server and configuring partial configurations.
