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 extra minutes when dealing with these tasks in your Windows Server world.

Years ago, quite a bit of effort was regularly put into figuring out which roles and services could co-exist because the number of servers available to us was limited. With the new virtualization and cloud paradigm shift, many companies have a virtually unlimited number of servers that can be running, and this means we are running much larger quantities of servers to perform the same jobs and functions. Management and administration of these servers then becomes an IT burden and adopting the centralized administration tools and ideas available within Windows Server 2019 will also save you considerable time and effort in your daily workload. In the next chapter, we will start to dive into some of the most commonly used roles and tools in a Windows Server environment, the core infrastructure technologies surrounding Active Directory.