There are a number of technologies in Windows Server 2016 that you need to know if you plan to ever work in a Windows environment. These are technologies such as Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS), Domain Name System (DNS), and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). If you haven't noticed already, everything in the Windows world has an acronym. In fact, you may only recognize these items by their acronyms, and that's okay.

Nobody calls DHCP the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol anyway. But do you know how to build these services and bring a Windows Server infrastructure online from scratch, with only a piece of hardware and a Windows Server 2016 installation disk to guide your way? This is why we are here today. I would like to instruct you on taking your first server and turning it into everything that you need to run a Microsoft network.

Every...

The directory structure that Microsoft networks use to house their users and computer accounts is called Active Directory (AD), and the directory information is controlled and managed by Domain Controller (DC) servers. Two other server roles that almost always go hand-in-hand with Active Directory are DNS and DHCP, and in many networks, these three roles are combined on each server where they reside. A lot of small businesses have always made do with a single server containing all three of these roles, but in recent years, virtualization has become so easy that almost everyone runs at least two DCs, for redundancy purposes. And if you are going to have two DCs, you may as well put the DNS and DHCP roles on them both to make those services redundant as well. But I'm getting ahead of myself. For this recipe...

AD is the core of your network. It has ties to everything! As such, it makes sense that you would want this to be as redundant as possible. In Windows Server 2016, creating a secondary DC is so easy that you really have no reason not to do it. Can you imagine rebuilding your directory following a single server hardware failure where you have 100 user accounts and computers that are all part of the domain that just failed? How about with 1,000 or even 10,000 users? That could take weeks to clean up, and you'll probably never get it back exactly the way it was before. Additionally, while you are stuck in the middle of this downtime, you will have all kinds of trouble inside your network since your user and computer accounts are relying on AD, which would then be offline. Here are the steps to take a second server in your network and join it...

AD is the structure in which all of your user, computer, and server accounts reside. As you add new users and computers into your domain, they will be automatically placed into generic storage containers. You could get away with leaving all of your objects in their default locations, but there are a lot of advantages to putting a little time and effort into creating an organizational structure.

In this recipe, we will create some Organizational Units (OUs) inside Active Directory and move our existing objects into these OUs so that we can create some structure.

We will need a DC online for this recipe, which is a Server 2016 machine with the Active Directory...

Most folks working in IT are familiar with using the ping command to test network connectivity. If you are trying to test the connection between your computer and another, you can ping it from a Command Prompt and test whether or not it replies. This assumes that the firewalls in your computers and network allow the ping to respond correctly, which generally is true. If you are inside a domain network and ping a device by its name, that name resolves to an IP address, which is the device's address on the network. But what tells your computer which IP address corresponds to which name? This is where DNS comes in. Any time your computer makes a request for a name, whether it is you pinging another computer or your Outlook e-mail client requesting the name of your Exchange Server, your computer always reaches out to your network's DNS...

Now that we are familiar with moving around a little bit inside the DNS management tool, we are going to create and test another type of record. This one is called a CNAME, and it is easiest to think of this one as an alias record. Rather than taking a DNS name and pointing it at an IP address, as we do with a host record, with a CNAME, we are going to take a DNS name and point it at another DNS name! Why would this be necessary? If you are hosting multiple services on a single server but want those services to be contacted by using different names, CNAME records can be your best friend.

We are going to make use of the same environment that we used to create our A records...

In the Configuring a combination Domain Controller, DNS server, and DHCP server recipes, we installed the DHCP role onto a server called DC1. Without some configuration, however, that role isn't doing anything. In most companies that I work with, all of the servers have statically assigned IP addresses, which are IPs entered by hand into the NIC properties. This way, those servers always retain the same IP address. But what about client machines that might move around, or even move in and out of the network? DHCP is a mechanism that the clients can reach out to in order to obtain IP addressing information for the network that they are currently plugged into.

This way, users or admins don't have to worry about configuring IP settings on the client machine, as they are configured automatically by the DHCP server. In...

In a simple DHCP scope, any device that connects and asks for an IP address is handed whatever IP is next available within the scope. If you have a device for which you always want to keep the same IP address, you could manually configure the NIC properties with a static IP address. Otherwise, a more centralized way to assign a particular IP to the same device on a long-term basis is to use a DHCP reservation. Using a reservation in DHCP to assign an IP to a device makes a lot of sense, because you can see that reservation right in the DHCP console and you don't have to worry about keeping track of the static IP addresses that you have configured out in the field. Let's walk through configuring a quick reservation so that you are familiar with this process.