 My name is Ken Mayer. I'll be your instructor throughout this course and a little bit of a background. I've been in some sort of technology field involving computers since the early 80s. The last 18 years I've spent as a consultant, contractor, and of course in some training. And I've been able to work with Windows from very different flavors all the way back to the days prior to NT, the NT4, Windows 2000, 2003, and so now here we are with Windows 2008. I've also worked with other operating systems and other vendors. I'm Cisco certified as well, working with Juniper Networks, so I do a lot of routing and switching, so I kind of hit the full gamut of what's out there in the network. But my biggest focus has also been on security, doing the ethical hacking, the penetration tests into other networks. And so with all of that experience, what my hopes are going to be is that as we talk about managing and maintaining Windows, that I can bring all of these other pieces into this course for you to be able to give you a very well-rounded set of knowledge and of course to be able to make you able to work with Windows 2008 and for those of you who are certification seeking to be able to help you on your way to getting that Windows certification. Now in this chapter, we're going to talk about getting ready for the installation of 2008 server. So we're going to talk about, kind of as an overview, some of the options that you have on how to deploy the 2008 server. We're going to talk about any compatibility issues you should be looking at, either with legacy systems or legacy applications that are running. And when we gather that information, we're then going to show you how to develop a plan for the deployment of server 2008. In this lesson, we're going to talk about as an overview of the ways in which you can go about doing a deployment of server 2008. First things we're going to say is that we should understand what are the business needs we're trying to meet by deploying this technology and making sure that's the first thing we look at as we come up with a plan. From there, we're going to decide, do we want the 32-bit version or the 64-bit version? There's a lot of advantages with going to 64 bits, like extra memory capabilities and many better performance issues, but again, could have some legacy issues. And of course, don't forget any of the other types of considerations that you have as far as some deployment because now with 2008 server, you might want to do some consolidation, have multiple roles in the same server, build it for high availability with clustering, and of course, virtualization is a big part of what I can do in 2008, so that should be another part of your considerations. First of all, when we start asking what requirements do you need for the purpose of the migration to 2008, you can take it down and break it into maybe three different areas that you could study, the server management, the user experience, and the operations. So with the server management, one of the things that you're going to see with Windows 2008 is that it's going to be able to meet most every need that you have because it's going to offer some very flexible deployment features. And when I talk about the deployment, I'm talking about much more than just installing software onto the hard drive. I'm talking about the fact that you have all of these server roles that you're going to get to pick and choose from. And we're going to talk about what you can install. We're even going to show you how flexible it is that you can install 2008 server without having the GUI portion available for you, that it can be an entire command line field that you do all of your work. It's called the server core. So that's a lot of flexibility that you choose the type of installation, what type of interaction you want to have with it, and then you choose the roles, what we used to call services, that run on this server. Another feature for the server management is the security. As we had with Windows 2003 and Small Business Server, we have the Windows firewall, but there's more to it that we have available for us besides just the Windows firewall. We're going to see that you have the ability, if you want to do this, to be able to utilize a lot of different security features. Including the fact that you can say, hey, any client server communications has to be encrypted with IPsec. And with your group policies, you can push that out. We're also going to look at some of the ideas of the network authentication that we have to be able to make sure that if a client connects, that they are what we call healthy enough to be in our network. So there's a lot of great security features that are built in there. And then the scalability is going to be out there for you to be able to create large clusters of servers. In whatever aspect you can think of, Windows 2008 server is going to be able to meet your needs. That also includes some of the things like virtualization. And I haven't talked about it, but we'll see again. So when we say, what are the business requirements? And we talk about server management. Our goal is to say, hey, look, you can do this with the flexibility of the deployment, with the flexibility of the roles. You have lots of security options, new ones you never had before. And it can scale out over your enterprise. As far as the user experience, well, they're going to see the same consistent front end or connectivity that they're used to having with Windows. Now I realize as we focus and make people go from all of the different variations of Windows that sometimes the user interface may move a few things around, but for the most part, the look and feel is the same consistency of what they're expecting. We're going to see that users now have mobility, obviously, with Windows out there on all of our PDAs, on our cell phones, the blackberries and everything else that are out there. With that kind of mobility and the ability to still connect to the servers, we're going to be able to give them a lot of great user experiences and be able to keep them very productive. And of course, it's functional. It's not just something that you use to play videos or to play games. There's a lot of functionality in all of the different varieties of the workstation or the client side application of Windows. And then as I said with the operations, we're going to see eventually a recoup of all the costs for making this migration through what they call the total cost of ownership. As we saw when we went from Windows NT to Windows 2000, there was a big curve there for people to say, do I really want to make that change? And they kept saying it's TCO, TCO, total cost of ownership. And it proved to be true that moving to Windows 2000 gave us so much bang for the buck that it made it very easy to manage. It gave us features that made productivity go up for all of our employees and eventually the cost of making the migration was easily absorbed by all of the benefits that you have. You're going to see the same thing here that the cost of operations, especially with things like server consolidation, are going to be able to help you immediately recoup what it takes to be able to make this migration. And of course, the SLAs, if you have some service level agreements, we want to make sure that we follow those so that we can actually improve or meet the standards that we have to have for our organization. Now, I'm not talking about an SLAs, you are the service provider providing something out to a bunch of customers. But in the same aspect as the enterprise solution for our operating system, we are working with all the other employees who are technically our customers. And so we want to maintain a level of agreement or a level of operations for them. Now in the consolidation, a couple of things to look at with consolidation with server 2008, first of all in hardware. We can actually save on a lot of the costs of hardware because now, as we'll talk about in virtualization, I can run multiple servers on the same hardware platform where I used to need to have separate servers for every operation that I had. So we're going to see that we're going to see a benefit of cost. We're still going to have 64-bit support as well on the hardware. Now on the servers, of course, like I said, we have the consolidation capability. We can run more than one server, or what they now call role, on each of the 2008 servers. So in the past, where you may have kind of thought, you know, I'm going to run exchange on this box and that's all I'm going to run. I really don't want to see it running something else on the side. Now, through consolidation, and we're going to talk about some good compatibilities, you can run multiple roles on each of these servers. Again, that's going to cut down on the overhead of how many servers you have to buy, how many you have to have deployed. The virtualization is going to help consolidate the hardware, putting multiple servers on the same physical hardware platform. And all of that are going to be some of the things that we're going to talk about when it comes to consolidation. And of course, the business continuity, as I said, you all have virtual machines. We're also going to talk about that server core, the installation of Windows without the GUI. And we'll talk about the soft grid. So there's a lot of features here that are going to be able to, as we said, help you, I hope, save money by consolidating hardware, by consolidating roles onto one server where you may have had multiple servers and for business continuity, virtual machines, server core, lots of things that we have as features. Again, remember, this chapter was designed as an overview of what we're going to talk about in the future throughout this course. High availability. Well, of course, we always have hardware solutions for the high availability, and they can be hardware solutions that we might not even, as a point of view of the operating system, even known we're out there. But you still have RAID adapters, either redundant array of independent disks, or the redundant array of inexpensive disks, I've heard of both ways. But the goal here is to have multiple hard drives, presenting themselves as a volume in such a way that if anyone hard drive fails, if it's a good RAID adapter, I can pull that hard drive out, put a new one in, rebuild it without there ever being any downtime. With having Nick teaming to be able to, again, have more than one network interface card working together so that if one goes down, the other one's still up. And that way, again, we're maintaining our connectivity. We're keeping that service level agreement up. We're hitting those five nines, as we say, of uptime. So some of those options are there as well, and hot swappable hardware. Hot swappable meaning, again, I don't have to take the entire server offline to make a change for certain components, but I can literally make that change while the server's still running. So those are some of the things that we'll see hardware-wise that maintain high availability. And as far as the software is concerned, then, of course, we have fault-tolerant applications. And we'll also look at clustering. And more than the fault-tolerant applications, we're going to really focus on the clustering, what we call the failover cluster, so that I can have two or more servers running the same software acting as a virtual server for all of those clients out there. So in other words, I need something like a file server, and I can have two actual servers working together to be a single file server. If one of the two goes down, the other one takes over the job, and nobody knows that it's gone down. That's especially great for our web deployments, for the web services, where we don't want our business web applications to go down, or for many of our database services, where we need to have a constant access to our data. So those are things that we're going to look at when it comes to the high availability. The benefit of the 64-bit system, well, one of the things that we have with Windows 2008 is that it allows us to be able to utilize the newer hardware. So that means we have an increased and addressable memory so that we can improve how much memory is sitting on each of our servers. It supports a greater workload, obviously, than a 32-bit system. It also allows backward compatibility so that you can still run your 32-bit applications on the 64-bit system. But eventually, we hope all of these applications will be upgraded to that 64-bit architecture. So we have the application support software-wise. You may have issues with licensing, of course, as you do with any software, including with Windows itself. So we'll talk about that as we get into some of the licensing features. And of course, there is the challenge of upgrading. Sometimes during an upgrade or after the upgrade, and you're running a 64-bit system, as much as we would like to say, every application is going to run. There could be those applications that are unable to work in the 64-bit system. So sometimes there's going to be a challenge there, and that means a new cost of trying to get those applications upgraded and working and the compatibility. There could be some issues. So that's a part of overall of what we're going to look at when we talk about planning. But our biggest benefit is that we are using an operating system that is taking advantage of the 64-bit systems. And that's a good thing that we want to use as we move forward and continue to be able to get the best of the hardware to be able to get more memory and to be able to get a better workload through each of our servers. In the virtualization, we're going to talk about the Windows Server Virtualization, where I can literally have more than one Windows 2008 server running on the single server hardware platform. Now, it is only available in the 64-bit architecture. So again, we're going to be taking advantage of having the 64-bit architecture. But even better than that, we can take advantage of those beefier servers that we buy. For instance, you could have maybe a quad socket server where you have four processors and each of those processors being a quad core. And so suddenly I've got these 16 processors on this one hardware server. And if I wanted to, I could take each of those literal quad cores and make them a complete independent server. And with all the memory that you can put into one of these servers, I can partition off, you know, eight gigs for this server, eight gigs for this server, and so forth. And just as I just made it sound, have four very high-speed quad core servers running on the same hardware platform. And of course, you can mix it up from there. You might have dual cores, you might not have as many sockets, whatever the case is. The idea of virtualization is just simply to say that I want to have multiple servers on the same hardware platform. And of course, we have to deal with licensing. And we'll talk about how that goes into effect with virtualization when we get to that particular chapter. When we're talking about the deployment of Windows Server 2008, one of the questions you're gonna ask is, are there any compatibility issues? So we're going to answer that question by saying or assuming that there probably could be or probably will be. And so we're gonna go through a series of steps to help work through those potential compatibility issues by first of all, starting off and developing an application migration plan. Then we're gonna talk about developing a hardware upgrade plan, and then we'll talk about what issues might prevent you being able to deploy Windows Server 2008, issues that may be insurmountable and need to be addressed fully before you can even do the installation.