Installing the operating system itself 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 2016 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 other hand, is more of a subset of functions that you can install onto a server. Features can complement...

Whether you are installing new roles, running backups and maintenance programs, or troubleshooting and repairing a server, it makes sense that you would log in to 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 since technology had advanced to the point where we had the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) available to us, we quickly transitioned over to logging in to our servers remotely using RDP. Even though it's been around for many years, RDP is still an incredibly powerful 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, you can work on a server halfway around the world just as quickly as one sitting in the cubicle next to you.

In fact...

At the beginning of this chapter, we walked through the process for installing the Windows Server 2016 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 is essentially the same. Plugging in the CD, booting to it, and letting the installer run its course is an easy enough thing to do, but what if you needed to build out ten new servers instead of just one? This process would start to get tedious in a hurry, 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 out your servers as virtual machines, which is so often the case these days, then this process works great and can save...

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 2016 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...