To step through this recipe, you will need a Windows Server 2012 R2 system online. There are no other prerequisites.

Let's take a look at three different ways to shut down or restart your system. The first two are the most commonly employed. The third is less commonly known, but is by far my preference when tasked with restarting a remote server.

The first option would be to use the power button on the Start screen. So far, I don't think that many administrators have stumbled into this one, because it didn't exist in Server 2012.

The second method to accomplish shutting down or restarting is by using the charms bar. The charms bar is the little menu that presents itself when you have your mouse sitting near the upper-right corner of your screen. On a touchscreen computer, you swipe your finger from the right side of the screen toward the middle to make it appear. Go ahead and hover the mouse in the upper-right corner of your screen until the charms bar appears. Then click on Settings, and then on Power. Unfortunately, this is the most common way to attempt to restart a Server 2012 R2 machine. I say unfortunately because it is so easy to hover in the corner and display the wrong charms bar, the one for your own Desktop for example.

Many mistaken reboots are caused by this.

The most definitive, and dare I say most fun way of restarting your server is to utilize Command Prompt. Doing this gives you the opportunity to double check that you are manipulating the correct machine. Open up Command Prompt and run a quick hostname check to make sure you are restarting the one you really intend to. Then utilize the shutdown command to take care of the rest. This process can be especially helpful when logged into remote servers using RDP. Use the following commands to perform the explained operations:

hostname
shutdown /r /t 0

If you were to simply type shutdown, the server would shut itself down in 60 seconds. Using /r indicates a restart rather than a shut down, and /t 0 is a timing flag that indicates the number of seconds the server should wait before restarting. Specifying slash zero here tells it to wait for zero seconds before initiating the restart.

Shutting down or restarting a server doesn't require a lot of explanation, but I hope that this small recipe gets some thought going about creative ways to do regular tasks. As you will see throughout this book, you can accomplish anything in Windows Server 2012 R2 through the use of commands or scripts. You could easily turn the shutdown command, the last example that we tested in this recipe, into a batch file, and place it on the Desktop of each of your servers as a quick double-click option for accomplishing this task.

However, I work with RDP windows inside RDP windows very often. When you're bouncing around between a dozen servers that all have the same background, I have decided that the only sure-fire way to make sure you are restarting the correct device is to do a quick hostname check before you initiate the restart. If you are interested in discovering all of the available flags that are available to use with the shutdown command, make sure to type in shutdown /? some time to take a look at all of the available options.

All you really need is a Windows Server 2012 R2 machine online. The more roles and services that you have running on it, the more options that you will see on your screen as we navigate these menus.

To launch Administrative Tools from your Desktop, perform the following steps:

There you go. A full list of all the admin tools installed onto that server. Heading into this list is also a quick way of taking a look into what a particular server is doing, which you can take an educated guess at based on what roles and services are installed. By looking at the screenshot below, we can see that this is a pretty standard server instance that is not yet running any big roles. Once added, the management tools for the Windows roles will present themselves in this list.

Since Server Manager likes to open automatically when logging in, let's make quick use of it for opening the tools that we need to do our jobs. Another way to have easy access to your tools from the Desktop is to create shortcuts, or to pin each of them to your Taskbar. Sometimes this isn't as easy as it sounds. In the past, these tools were all grouped together in the Administrative Tools folder, so you didn't have any reason to memorize the exact names of the tools. If you were to head into the Start screen and try to recall the name of the service you are looking for to type into the Search field, it may not immediately come to you. If you're a consultant working on someone else's server, you may not want to pin anything to their Desktop anyway, and you certainly don't want to resort to using Bing in front of them to look up the name of the service. So I like to stick with launching Administrative Tools from Server Manager.

A running Windows Server 2012 R2 machine is all we need to highlight this one. In fact, this menu also exists on any Windows 8.x computer, so make use of it often!

There are two ways to open this little menu. While you are in the Server 2012 R2 Desktop, you can perform either of these steps:

This little "quick-tasks admin menu" is very easy to open, and is very convenient for launching programs and settings that are accessed often. I won't talk too much about what particulars are in the menu as it's pretty self-explanatory, but I use this menu multiple times per day to open up the System properties and the command prompt. Particularly the command prompt, as it has an option to open an administrative command prompt right from the menu.

For this recipe, you will need a Windows Server 2012 R2 system online.

To search in Windows Server 2012 R2, we have to make our way to the Start screen. Fortunately, this is extremely easy to do. No matter where you are or what application you are in, if you press the Windows key or click on the Start button, you will be taken to the Start screen.

Now you simply start typing. Search results for anything found on the system that relates to the word you are inputting are automatically displayed. Once you see the item you are looking for, you can press Enter or click on it. Additionally, if you right-click on the item or hold down the Ctrl key while clicking it, you will receive additional options that you can perform with this application. For example, right-click or Ctrl click in order to launch command prompt as an administrator.

By default, your search will encompass the entire operating system. If you would rather narrow the scope of your search down to only Settings or Files, you can use the Everywhere dropdown and choose accordingly.

You can see it is very easy not only to open applications, but also its specific settings.

From the Start screen, we can search for anything on the server. This gives us the ability to quickly find and launch any program or application that we have installed. This includes Administrative Tools. Rather than moving into Server Manager in order to launch your administrative consoles from the Tools menu, you can also search for them on the Search screen, and launch from there. It also gives us the ability to find files or documents by name. Another powerful way to use the Search function in Windows Server 2012 R2 is to open any kind of setting that you might want to change. In previous versions of Windows, you had to either memorize the way to get into the settings that you wanted to change or you had to open up Control Panel where you had to poke and prod your way around until you stumbled upon the one that you were looking for. Now it is a very simple matter of pressing the Windows key, typing the first few characters of the setting or program you want to launch, and pressing Enter.

Another common task to perform from the Search screen is to right-click on the application that you are trying to launch and pin it somewhere. When you right-click on a program from the Search screen, you see options to pin the program to either your Start screen or to the Taskbar. This will create a quick-launch shortcut on either the main Start screen or on the Taskbar of the Desktop mode, giving you easier and faster access to launch those applications in the future.

For this recipe, we need two servers. One is the machine we are physically logged into. Another is a server on the same network that we can contact from our primary server, so that we can manage it from our local Server Manager.

To manage a local as well as a remote server from the same Server Manager window, perform the following instructions:

Server Manager makes use of the Windows Remote Management (WinRM) tools to remotely manipulate servers. Historically, most of us who are administering Windows Servers make extensive use of RDP, often having many windows and connections open simultaneously. This can cause confusion and can lead to tasks being accomplished on servers for which they are not intended. By using Server Manager from a single machine to manage multiple servers in your network, you will increase your administrative efficiency as well as minimize human error by having all management happen from a single pane of glass.

This recipe is written with the most common network scenario in mind, which is a domain environment where both servers have been joined to the domain. If you are working with standalone servers that are part of a workgroup, rather than being joined to a domain, you will have some additional considerations. In the workgroup scenario, WinRM will need to be enabled specifically, and the Windows Firewall will have to be adjusted in order to allow the right ports and protocols for that WinRM traffic flow to happen successfully. In general though, most of you will be working within a Microsoft domain network, in which case these items are not necessary.

To start using PowerShell, all you need is a server with Windows Server 2012 R2 installed. PowerShell is installed and enabled by default.

To get a feel of using PowerShell, perform the following steps:

PowerShell has so many commands and cmdlets, we just wanted to get a feel for launching the program and pulling some data with this particular recipe. There are countless Get commands to query information from the server, and as you have seen those cmdlets have various parameters that can be appended to the cmdlets to pull more specific data to meet your needs. To make things even better, there are not only Get cmdlets, but also Set cmdlets, which will allow us to make use of the PowerShell prompt to configure many aspects of the configuration on our server, as well as remote servers. We will dive further into PowerShell in a later chapter.

As long as you have a Windows Server 2012 R2 installed and running, you are ready to install roles and features onto that machine.

To install a role and a feature into Windows, perform the following steps:

After your roles and features have finished installing, the server may or may not have to reboot. This depends on whether or not the role installation requires it. Following installation, or following the reboot, if your new role needs any additional configuration or setting up to be completed, you will be notified at the top of the Server Manager screen.

Adding roles and features to a Windows Server is something that every administrator will have to do sooner or later. These items are necessary to turn on the functions in the server that will perform tasks that need to be performed in your environment. Adding roles is quite straightforward. However, it is interesting to see the options that are available to add more than one role or feature at a time. Moreover, the ability to remotely install these items for servers in your network that you are not logged into is intriguing.

To test out the RSAT tools, we will need a Windows 8.x client machine. We will then also need a Windows Server 2012 R2 system online, and on the same network, which we can remotely control and manage.

To remotely manage a server using RSAT, perform the following instructions:

Server Manager in Windows Server 2012 R2 is a powerful tool that can be used for the management of not only the local server, but also remote servers that you want to manage. If we take this even a step further and install the RSAT tools on a Windows 8 computer, this gives us the ability to launch and use Server Manager from our everyday Windows 8 computer. In doing so, we enable ourselves the ability to add roles, view events, and restart servers, all from our own desk. Managing servers using these tools will increase productivity and decrease errors, because your entire infrastructure of servers can be available within a single window. This is much more efficient than using the RDP client to connect to many different servers, all in different windows. If you've never tried using RSAT to manage servers, give it a try!

We are going to run these commands and keyboard shortcuts while logged into a Windows Server 2012 R2 machine.

Keyboard shortcuts can greatly increase productivity once you are fluent with them. This is not an extensive list by any means, there are many more key combinations that you can use to launch apps, minimize and maximize windows, and do all sorts of other functions. This is a list to get you started with the most common ones that I employ often. Start using these with your daily tasks and I bet your mouse will start to feel lonely.

If you are interested in exploring more of the Windows Server 2012 R2 key combinations available, this website is a great place to start: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831491.aspx.

We will be working within a PowerShell prompt on our Windows Server 2012 R2 box.

Follow these steps to set the PowerShell Execution Policy:

The PowerShell Execution Policy is a simple setting and easy to change, but can make a world of difference when it comes to running your first scripts. If configured to be more restrictive than you intend, you will have trouble getting your scripts to run and may think that you have mistyped something, when in fact the issue is only the policy. On the other hand, in an effort to make your servers as secure as possible, on machines where you don't need to execute PowerShell scripts, it makes sense to restrict this access. You may also want to read some additional information on the signing of scripts to see whether creating and executing signed scripts would make more sense in your own environment.

Our work with PowerShell today will be accomplished from a Windows Server 2012 R2 machine. PowerShell is installed by default with Windows, and there is nothing further that we need to install.

Follow these steps to build and execute our first PowerShell script:

In this recipe, we created a very simple PowerShell script and saved it on our server for execution. While in practice getting time and date information from your server may come faster by using the stand-alone Get-Date cmdlet, we use this recipe to give a small taste of the ISE and to get your scripting juices flowing. Expanding upon the ideas presented here will start to save you valuable time and keystrokes as you identify more and more ways to automate the tasks and information gathering that are part of your daily routines. The possibilities behind PowerShell are practically limitless, so make sure that you open it up and start becoming familiar with the interfaces and tools associated with it right away!

We will be running some commands from inside PowerShell on a Windows Server 2012 R2 machine.

To use the Get-Help function inside PowerShell, run the following steps:

The Get-Help cmdlet in PowerShell can be used with virtually any command in order to find out more information about that particular function. I often use it when the specific name of a cmdlet that I want to use escapes my memory. By using Get-Help as a search function, it will present a list of available cmdlets that include the keyword you specified. This is a brilliant addition to PowerShell, and makes it so much more powerful than command prompt.

Also included with the Get-Help files are all of the special syntax and parameter options for each cmdlet that you might be working with. This saves you time from having to go to the Web in order to search for these functions, and it is just way more fun doing it at the command line than in a web browser.