 Hi and welcome to the video courses for Windows Server 2016. My name is Patrick Loner and I'll be your instructor. Let's start with a little bit about my background. I've been in the IT industry for just about 18 years. I got my start with an MCSE on Windows NT and have sort of worked my way up through the ranks on every version of Windows that has existed. I began my career in a position of network administration at a training center where I handled just about everything, imaging of PCs, hardware and software, troubleshooting in classroom environments, as well as for the business side of things. Touched just about everything and sort of felt like a jack-of-all-trades master of none. I quickly got into training, some of the Windows 2000 courses and CompTIA courses, and as they say, the rest is history. And I've been working as a Microsoft certified trainer now for the better part of 18 years. I've had a couple of positions, one with the training center, another with a network consulting firm for three years where we were involved heavily in projects for upgrading to newer versions of Windows Server, upgrading and migrating to exchange. For the past 10 years, I've operated as a freelance trainer and network consultant. It's my pleasure to be your instructor on these courses and let's get ready to get into the material. In this first topic, we're going to just go through an introduction to Windows Server 2016, along with talking about the various installation options, additions and licensing. As I said, knowing the capabilities of the operating system is going to enable you to utilize it effectively and take full advantage of what it can offer for your organization. Some of the changes in Windows Server 2016 include increased scalability and performance, improved virtualization, improved management tools, additional deployment options like the nano server option. And so we're going to be discussing those different features and capabilities, in particular those that relate to the computer and storage space, along with various installation options that are available. So let's start in this first section with just installing Windows Server 2016. And you can see we'll go through an introduction to Windows Planning for Installation. We'll go through the procedure for installing nano server and server core. If you're not familiar with nano server, don't worry, we're going to go into that as well. And then finally, adding roles and features. So we begin with the introduction, okay? Knowing the capabilities of this system is going to help you in the installation. It's going to help you with the configuration of the OS, choosing the right addition, choosing the roles and features. Of course, roles, if you're familiar with previous versions, just relate to the job that the server's doing within your environment, the particular functionality that it provides. And then features assist us by adding capabilities to individual roles that are already installed. Windows Server 2016 has been awaited for quite some time, all right? It was the release of this version of the server that was delayed several times. So it's a long-awaited upgrade to Windows Server 2012 R2. And it does provide enhancements in a number of different areas, okay? Those areas would be the versions. We have some additional versions that are available. Hyper-V has quite a number of advancements, specifically in the area of containers, which is an isolation mechanism to allow us to be more efficient in the handling of hardware resources when we're utilizing hardware virtualization. Storage support, there are new protocols like data center bridging, ISNS, along with increased enhanced support for storage area networks like Fiber Channel and iSCSI. In addition to that, we've got the enhancement to the storage spaces feature that was introduced in Windows Server 2012 that provides us with a lot of flexibility and scalability even when dealing with direct-attached storage. There are gonna be some changes to failover clustering as well that's going to help us to implement high availability. And PowerShell can.