 Hi. Welcome to Server 2012. My name is Sandra Batakis and I'm here to lead you through a whole lot of material. Now, we do have the intention of the class of installation and configuration and getting you ready if you happen to be prepping for exams. But what I can tell you is through all of my years of both instructing and working in the field, everything that we go through today will require a whole lot more studying. Now, I have been working with the Windows products since literally DOS 5.0. In fact, I got my first MCSE in DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1. Well, not only does that date me, but I can tell you that from teaching all of the technologies from DOS Forward, taking all of the MCSE tests from DOS Forward, there's a whole lot of information. What's great is a lot of this information that we get to go through is going to rely on not only what I say through the course, but really life experience. Now, both in the classroom and in the field, I'll try to bring as much of that reality as I can to you. Not only do I do a lot of these courses, but I do operate a consulting company where we go out and live in the field just like all of you take in this course. So, if it's going to go wrong, I've already been there. If it's going to go right, happily I've been there too. Let's take all of this courseware and all of our actual hands-on experience, get through this course and see what we can do. The first thing I would like to address is on-premise versus cloud. Now, we always have the technical documentation and you see lots and lots about cloud computing. So, everyone always asks me what we're going to do or why we would. Why don't we just put everything in a cloud? In fact, I had this conversation less than a week ago with a very good client of mine. They're a relatively small network. They have a couple of servers. Most of what they have is realistically in the cloud in terms of all of the applications they use to track their customers, the customer's data and everything that they do. Their email is also in the cloud. We also have SharePoint out in the cloud. So, based on that, the conversation was really why do I need to buy a new server? Why can't we just let this run into the ground and continue? Well, the big issue here is really what type of services you want to give the actual computers. So, before I go through what the on-premise can do for you, let's talk a little bit about what the cloud is all about. Now, the cloud is becoming increasingly popular. I personally have a good portion of my customers out in the cloud. And really what happens is services like email or SharePoint sites, even data stores or data backups can all be taking place at the cloud. You can also host an actual server in the cloud. And there's a number of ways to do that, whether you're going through the Microsoft version of hosting full servers or, of course, you have someone in an actual data center space where you're sharing their space and you have your own server. The whole point of cloud computing is to make resources available to you regardless of where you are. We have a lot of users that are now working from home, from remote offices. We have workers everywhere. So, by having something as central as the cloud works extremely well. Now, if we talk of something as simple as storage and shared resources, I can say even for a lot of what I do. So, as we teach these courses, and I write my slides, I get to email them to editing, they get to email me back. And after about the fifth email, we can be very confused on what versions are happening. With something like a cloud or a SharePoint site, you can upload, keep version information, keep comment information and have everything in one site. As a matter of fact, I can edit right there from the cloud. So, it doesn't matter if I'm in my home office, my business office, or at a customer site, I can access all that information and continue to work on it. So, that really is the feature of the cloud. If you put your email in the cloud, it means if you lose your internet connection, it doesn't mean your emails are going to be bouncing and not coming in. They may be bouncing to your desktop, but they'll still come in your phones or be available via web access. So, it's all about high availability regardless of where you're working. That's what the cloud is all about. So, what we typically see is storage, email, and items like SQL Server up in the cloud so that we don't have to maintain them locally as well as redundant internet. Now, with a common cloud computing, again, it does depend on how you're going to do it. Now, you can lease the services from Microsoft. I have a lot of customers on 365, and here we do everything from dynamics to exchange server, but you can also host your SQL Server and your Microsoft System Center. Some of the other things that can happen in the cloud is you have something called an infrastructure as service, as well as known as IAS, which means you have a full virtual machine but it's being hosted in the cloud. As a matter of fact, I had mentioned a customer where everything's in the cloud, so do we actually need an on-site server? Really, everything being in the cloud, but they're using a remote desktop technology to go into a virtual machine, which happens to be a virtual server in Hyper-V. The advantage, of course, someone else gets to play with the hardware, not only manage it and back it up, but we still have to maintain the desktop experience and the software in that server. Now, Microsoft does have Windows Azure, which is available for you to go ahead and put your infrastructure up there in the cloud. Now, we also have software as service, which means they're going to host a particular application or infrastructure for a technical application, and we, of course, have Intune, which is all for PC maintenance, but the one that most people have heard of is Office 365, where you have full-blown exchange server, you have full-blown SharePoint sites, and everything that you're doing is up in the cloud. A third version, or I guess we'll call it category of cloud computing, is something called Platform As Service, or P-A-A-S, which means the hosting provider will provision the platform, and this platform is how we're going to host all of our database applications. Now, they'll provide the database, and then, of course, we get to manage it. So, realistically, unless you're getting into the background of MCSE and getting into the background of really planning this architecture, the acronyms of I-A-S-S-A-A-S and P-A-A-S really isn't more common-speak, but really to show you that we have three distinct categories of how we're going to host information in the cloud. So, the cloud is very handy for high availability and letting someone else take care of the hardware and the backups. So, why is it that we need an actual local server? Why do we need an on-premise server? The biggest piece of why you want local resources provided to the clients on the on-premise side is for the network infrastructure itself, which means when you turn on a client computer, you need an IP address, it's got to have a default gateway, it's got to have accessibility, it's got to have accessibility to DNS, not only for internet name resolution, but internal name resolution. All of our authentication through Active Directory where the users are going to log on and, of course, application updates. So, when I go into a server, I can go ahead and push out Windows updates through WSUS, but I can also install all their third-party applications. So, maybe they use Norton Antivirus. I put the management console on the server. I upgrade only the server. I push that out as well as virus updates or virus definition updates to all the client workstations. So, all of this is handier than having, let's say, in a small network, 10 or 15 or even 500 in a larger network, clients with static IP addresses, static IP configurations, and then local user accounts. So, when someone locks themselves out and no one knows the administrator password locally, at this point, they're no longer in trouble. So, on the peer-to-peer network, it is harder to manage but can be done with an on-premise server. We can provide that network infrastructure and not only make it easier to maintain and administrate, but also gives us an ability to unlock user accounts when they don't know their password. Because, again, if no one knows the password to that local machine or it's been changed, we're really powerless without a domain admin. And, again, any of the application updates, whether it happens to be for antivirus program or whether it happens to be for Windows updates. Now, Server 2012 is promoted as cloud-ready, but you still need those local resources. And a good example is I just put out an implementation where Active Directory synchronized with an enterprise Office 365. So, we have a single sign-on, which provides my email access and my Windows access, and I'm really the same user, even though exchange is not necessarily on-premise. I'm going to quickly go through a couple of slides with our Windows Server editions. You need to understand that it's not just Windows Server, but there are licensing issues and actually cost issues with each one of the editions, so you get to pick the one that closely maps to what you need. Standard Edition is what I see the most of. You have everything you need, all roles, all features. They're all going to be available. Nowadays, we can go up to four terabytes of RAM, so you should be covered there. I can have up to 64 sockets. And with Standard Edition, if you install the Hyper-V role, assuming your hardware is Hyper-V ready, and most of the hardware is, you can use that same license that you installed the server with to create two more servers in the Hyper-V console as virtual machines. So essentially, you can buy one server and get three. Data Center is really if you've got an enormous corporation, let's say Microsoft, where you have pods of servers everywhere. You need all the roles and all the features, but really what's going to happen with Data Center is you're also looking for unlimited virtual machine licenses. Now, I say this is what you would use if you're a large organization, but even a small, medium-sized organization, I have a local police department that's got about 350 users, but we need a lot of servers. We did virtualize everything, and then what we took a look at is how many servers we needed to add. It was cheaper to buy the Data Center license than it was to buy the Standard Edition license for everything that we needed. So now, no matter what we want to populate a virtual machine with, we've got an unlimited license to do it. So you'll see you've got up to 64 sockets, but you do have more processor cores to work with, and again, you're up to 4 terabytes of RAM that will pretty much cover you regardless. Foundation is really a pretty super basic server. Maybe you just need a file server. Now, the problem with Foundation is it can't be joined to a domain, so I use the term file server very, very gently. I might use this for a web server, for a local storage server, so you're looking at, I guess I'll call it, an expensive workstation. A couple other additions you might want to know about. We have the Essentials Edition, so for those of you who've heard about Small Business Server and you're still looking for it, this is going to be your replacement. Now, the intention of a Small Business Server is to provide an enormous network infrastructure to a smaller organization. So if I have a small organization, I might need email, I might need SQL server, I need actual infrastructure, so all of this comes at a cost of a different license. So let's be super generic and say, you know, to buy Exchange and all the client access license, maybe I'm looking at 2K for a small company and maybe it's the same thing for SQL, and then this comes with the operating system, and there are actually other servers as well. So to have a Small Business Server, it includes a minimal license of all of this so that they're not incurring all of these high costs for a small organization. Now, you're going to have Exchange Server, but you can't have it enterprise-wide, so you don't have necessarily the enterprise version. You have what we'd consider a Small Business Server. Same thing for SQL. So it is a replacement of SPS. We don't have Hyper-V or Clustering or Core. It can't be an RDP server, so people can't be terminaling in with their own sessions. And here is where the power in the licensing makes a determination. You have a 25-user limit. You have a 50-device limit. You can only have two processor cores, and you're limited to 64 gigs of RAM, which again for this type of addition is more than enough. We have Hyper-V addition. Hyper-V means we have no user interface. We have no licensing fee for the operating system. We actually license the virtual machines individually. You have limited file services. Think of it as enough to actually host all your ISO files and what's needed for Hyper-V. Hyper-V can join a domain, and you've got 64 sockets and 4 terabytes of RAM. We have two storage additions. We have work-group addition and standard addition. The big difference between the two is when you're looking at a work-group addition, it does limit you and the amount of user connections, and of course a work-group means no active directory, and your standard addition allows you to support a domain membership, and you can license this for every two sockets. We also have multi-point, which means many users using the same host, but with separate input and output, most keyboard and monitor. We have socket, limited amount of RAM. We're looking at 12 session max, and not a lot of infrastructure roles or active directory support. And last but certainly not least, we have multi-point premium, which means, again, multiple users using the same host with input and output. We really have an ability to put on more RAM, more sessions, and a little bit of the network infrastructure. Server 2012 has an awful lot of roles. In fact, I've got a couple pages of them. So the ability to do things is there. It's just finding out what you need to accomplish and what role matches. So in general, let's go through fairly quickly all of the different server roles. So you have a general idea how the management and the role management is handled. Now, most people are used to thinking about active directory. Well, it's no longer as simple as active directory and a domain controller. You have active directory directory services for your users and your computer accounts, and this is really where your domains come from. But active directory also has certificate services, federation services, LDS, rights management. All of these together are part of active directory, but each one of them is compartmentalized into its own role. We also have a role called application server. So before you start hosting applications, maybe it's exchange, or maybe it's even something fairly small, you have to have the application server role on there. Now, this is really what provides some of the .NET framework and .NET enterprise services that are needed by most of these applications. We have server roles for infrastructure. The separate infrastructure roles are DHCP and DNS. So we can give out IP address configuration and we can also do some name resolution. We have fax server if you want to send and receive shared faxes. We have file and storage services, which is how you're going to actually make data available to the clients, meaning file shares and documents. Hyper-V for your virtualized environment. We have a network policy server, so as clients are joining the network, whether locally or via an actual VPN, we can make sure that those clients are healthy before they have access to the resources. So that's a really good security layer. Print and document services, remote access services, remote desktop services. And then, of course, we can get down through licensing. If you're licensing in a large organization, you don't want to have a 1Z2Z from desk to desk, but to actually have volume activation services installed so you can manage all of those volume licenses. IAS, of course, is for our web server. We have Windows DS, which allows us to deploy the operating systems to clients throughout the network, also known as WDS. We've got a few acronyms as it's been growing up through the versions. And, of course, we also have WSUS, where we can install a server role to gather all the updates for Windows and associated applications as they come in, we can approve them, and then they automatically go out to the clients. This, of course, is better than every client updating individually. So there's a lot of different server roles, and each one of those have a unique perspective on what you want that server to do. I do like that it's compartmentalized, so for performance alone, you can make a plan on what a server's going to do and make sure it's fully configured for just that role. Roles, of course, can be shared, and they can also coexist on the same server. I can have one server with many roles. It really is up to the hardware in which services you're trying to host. Features with Windows Server are little, what I like to call, turd-on and offs, which means you may need them, you may not need them. They're not large enough to be a full-blown role, meaning Active Directory Directory services is a role. There's a whole lot that that's going to do. Now, when you install these certain roles, sometimes they need sub-features to go with them. So, in example, if I'm hosting something that has some sort of web-based access, then it's probably going to have to install a couple features that will help it within IAS. So we have a couple pages of this. We're not going to go through them one by one by one, but I just want to show you that we have our .NET framework, which is for streaming. We have Drive Encryption, or Network Unlocks for Drive Encryption. We can go ahead and have Branch Crash for our remote offices so they can participate in the things that they need. Clients for NFS. We have all sorts of bridging, storage, clustering. We have a feature called Group Policy Management, meaning that's a nice little console that you can install so that someone can manage group policy across the network. Ink and handwriting services, Internet printing clients. So, again, all of these aren't necessarily all needed, but when they are needed, you essentially turn those features on or off. You're going to see here, we have a whole lot with IP address management and more storage management. We have media management, network load balancing. There's a peer name resolution protocol. Again, you'll know when you need them. It'll pop up and tell you you need them, or, of course, if you do your homework, it'll tell you what features is needed for everything that you'll be managing. So if you thought that list was long, we have a much longer list here just to show you, again, little features. So, an example, I might install IAS. It's a web server. So that's your core engine. IAS actually falls within the spectrum of an application server. So I have IAS, but now, suddenly, I need outbound email on a website or even for a smaller mail client. So I might add that feature in, but I don't always necessarily need it to host a website. Or maybe I'm scanning the network for errors or what we call traps or events. We have telnet client, telnet server. By default, telnet is not always installed, but I know that I use it all the time, so it's one of the first features I add back in because I like to telnet into certain machines. You'll see we've got infrastructure for the user interfaces and biometrics. So if I'm going to do biometrics, so maybe we need a fingerprint scan before we can log on locally to the server, we'd have to turn that on. We, of course, have PowerShell, the process activation server or WPAS, search services, server backup, migration tools. There are so many of them in here to help us. So if I'm planning a brand new network, I don't need migration tools. If I am migrating, then I might install a server and then add those in to help me with the process. So, collectively, a lot of roles to think about and a lot of features, the roles of your first level of planning, and then the features will expose themselves and make themselves obvious as you continue down through installing and configuring your server. So now it's time to focus on a fairly unique installation called Server Core. Most of us think conventionally of a server to have a graphical user interface, or at least those of us who've been around for a while. Well, Server Core does reduce our server down to literally a command prompt. When you want to get fancy, you can start PowerShell and be at a PowerShell command prompt. But basically what Server Core provides us is a very minimal interface. Now, the good news is it does give us a reduced attack surface. So in a lot of Windows products, we have so many services that are hosting, which just become open surfaces for hackers or attack surfaces. So here, we not only have a minimal surface for attack, which makes it more secure right off the bat, but we also have fewer things to manage. Now, with that, fewer things to manage is good because it's simpler, but it also limits what we can do on Server Core. For the most part, when you're hosting Server Core, it can host some of the pretty core server infrastructure roles, like Active Directory or IAS. Now, with that, you can't bring in a role and an application that relies on that role that needs the graphical components because it will not work. So based on that, Server Core, again, is something that we really install so it has a smaller footprint. We don't have to have more powerful hardware. We can just have the simple hardware to host the Server Core and, again, limit the hard drive, the RAM, and the processing speed. Server Core is actually an excellent virtualization platform because what happens with Server Core is we don't have all the background and hardware being utilized. It can actually be saved for the guest operating systems. When you choose Server Core, you actually have two installation options. Now, you have to think through this fairly carefully. There is Server Core, which is your standard option for deployment, or we could have Server Core management, which means we're actually installing a full version of Server Core. What that means realistically is the full version of Server Core means your user interface is still a prompt, but because it is all layered and done by role management, you can actually add the GUI back into Server Core so you're back to an actual graphical user interface. Now, the Server Core management is exactly like Server Core. Again, the only difference is you don't need to have an offline image to convert it to the GUI. If you have Server Core, the only way you can convert it to GUI is by using your offline image files. And again, beyond that, Server Core management, it's just a feature that you add. So, when you look at the installation options, I think that a picture says a thousand words. You can install basic Server Core, but if you install Server Core full server, it is on top of Server Core, and then you have modularized the actually GUI shell in the GUI management. So, we can add these features if we want, but if we don't add these features, we still have Server Core and the ability to do so. So, everything is very much layered. It's not necessarily integrated to the operating system itself. In previous versions of something like this, what would happen is if you wanted to convert from a base operating system to a full version, it wasn't modularized. You literally had to upgrade the server and run through the entire installation. There's a couple media formats that you should be aware of. One of them, of course, is a DVD, which everyone has heard of, but we also have something called an ISO or an ISO file. Now, with a DVD, of course, this means you have an actual CD, DVD ROM drive so that you can put the disc in the bay and go ahead and run your install. Now, what's interesting is, most people think that DVD might be the fastest because your source is right there, but DVDs do not operate as fast as an actual USB drive. So, if you were to load all the media on a USB drive, you would see that it actually runs a whole lot faster. Now, in some cases, depending on how you're getting the DVD, you can copy the contents onto a USB and then run it from there. Now, when you're working through DVDs, you must have the image of Windows Server. Do you understand that image is, in fact, read-only and you can't update it? So, your installation is only as good as when the DVD was created. Now, the other drawback with DVDs is you can only do one install at a time because, again, you have a CD ROM, you put it in the bay, you run the server. You technically can share the DVD out on the network, but remember we still have to look at the read-write access times of DVD and if there's multiple people accessing it, it will slow you down. So, now we can look at the ISO or ISO. The ISO is a downloadable format. It's basically a DVD image. Now, more and more, you're going to see this is how things are distributed. So, when I buy Windows Server, I can have hard media sent to me, meaning a DVD, but I usually prefer to get an ISO, put it up on a file share somewhere because it's easily downloadable and transferable. You can put it on an actual USB drive and boot to it. And the actual image source on the ISO can be updated. So, if there are things that you need to add into the install, you can do it with this file format. The ISO can also store an answer file and you can also mount an ISO as an hard DVD, meaning a physical DVD, if you're in virtualization. So, when I'm in Hyper-V creating a virtual machine, the first thing I do is tell it how to get to the CD-ROM, which can be the physical CD-ROM or an ISO file that I have right there on the server itself for access. We also have Windows DS, otherwise known as Windows Deployment Services. Now, with Windows Deployment Services, what we can do is create what's known as a WIM image. A WIM image is an actual operating system image that we can deploy. We can update it. We can edit it. We can do all sorts of things that we can do. Now, Windows DS is covered in different courses as we do a deeper dive. So, for now in terms, just think of Deployment Services as a way of a new client to boot up and receive an operating system from the server and this particular role. Now, Windows DS can access VHD files. VHD files are actually our virtual hard drive files that we use with Hyper-V. Now, we also have what is known as the WAKE, which is our Windows Administration Kit and that allows us to configure light touch installations and different types of installations. Now, the W-A-I-K can be downloaded from actual Microsoft.com. Windows DS does work with Pixie Boot. I mean, you have to have a network card that knows to wake up, look for DNS, get an IP address from DHCP and go find a WDS server in order to retrieve an operating system. All of this being done with multicast. So, I put this here because we do have to talk about installation options. Windows DS is an option, so if you take the time to create a server-based image, then that image can be deployed to two new servers. We have some other installation options that we really won't dive into here, but do understand that we do have server-based software called the System Center Configuration Manager, otherwise known as SCCM. You may want to go do a little bit of reading up on that, and that's really deployment options on a much grander scale for servers and workstations. We also have the virtual machine manager templates that can be used so we can deploy new virtual machines fairly quickly.