 Welcome to Administrating Windows Server 2012. My name is Sandra Butekis and I'll be taking you through a tour of what it takes to plan and maintain an active directory and Windows Server infrastructure. Now I've had the pleasure of working with the Microsoft technology since perhaps way before I want to admit because it does date me a little bit. I've been working with the Microsoft Windows platform since its first release of 3.1. I also remember the day that they came out with Windows for work groups 3.11 and we thought that was really cool. In that same realm, I also got to teach people what a mouse was and to watch them try to scan it across their screen and up their arm because everything was such a new technology. Back then, I remember being absolutely wowed at all the technology that was coming at us from advanced DOS to Windows being able to share files, having to use ProLink Plus. And as I've gone through the technology and seen Windows grow, not only is our need for technology grown, but the technology has grown with it and quite nice. So here in Windows Server 2012, we get a chance to see a little bit new of an interface and I will tell you, I didn't like it at first. When you get used to it, it's that old habits die hard. You'll find that as an administrator, the server items are right where they want to be. No more dragging all the things onto the desktop that you use day in and day out. You can actually arrange it and have everything right there at your fingertips. So what we'll do in this course is we'll take all that experience, how things used to be, how things are, and really what you need to do to support your users and I'll share as much of that knowledge with you as I can. In this module, we'll get a chance to learn what it is to deploy servers and workstations for that matter by using Windows Deployment Services. Now, Windows Deployment Services is a very robust way to manage images, deploy images, whether they're boot images or just the blank install images off a CD-ROM or even something that's customized to have them sitting up on a server to be deployed to a client workstation or server that needs them. So we'll go through all the phases of installing the role on the server and the prerequisites as well as the client prerequisites. And once we have a base setup, how to actually add and manage those images. Let's start off by talking about WDS. Now, I've had a chance to see WDS since Microsoft has decided to make it part of our lives. And when I say that, it's everything from deployment services, going back to RIS services and even before RIS. The whole concept is to take an image, an actual workstation image, and to deploy it down to the workstation. Not to put in the CD and start clicking on the next button to be able to take base metal workstation or server, boot up with a special type of environment and pull an image down off of the server. Now, this can be customized so only an administrator can do it and answer the prompts or it can even be streamlined where a user, if given the right permissions, can pull down a brand new workstation image to their desktop. And if it's automated enough, once it starts, they can go to the water cooler or get themselves a cup of coffee. Now, when you install WDS, there's actually two role services. If you need this to be an actual deployment server, you're going to need both of these services. We start off by the transport server. This is your core networking component. So in order for me to multicast or transfer any of the images across the network onto the workstations, this is the component that's gonna handle it. So what we do within the transport server is we create some multicast name spaces and we transmit this data, data being the image files from a standalone server onto, of course, the client or server that's requesting it. Now, you can use the transport server all by itself if for some reason you need a Pixi server that allows for clients to boot using the Pixi technology for some other custom setup or application. So it can be used independently of WDS if you need it for a custom application. Now, again, if you need WDS, which is the deployment server portion, then you're going to have to use the deployment server role service as well as the transport server. Deployment, of course, is the images portion, but transport is how they're going to make it out on the network. The deployment server service is the full functionality of Windows deployment services. And again, it's how we create and configure and also remotely install all of the operating systems. And once again, as a big reminder, it is completely dependent on the transport server component. When you're using Windows deployment services, again, we've already said, I've probably said a number of times, this is what allows the deployment of the operating systems. Now, let's step back a little bit and think about without deployment services, how is it that we install the operating systems? Well, we always have the CD or DVD in the sneaker network where you physically walk up to the workstation or server, put the CD in and start following the prompts, which can be, of course, a very timely process because we all know as fast as you walk away, it's ready for that next prompt. Now, the alternate is you can copy the contents of a CD onto a USB drive, you can boot to the USB drive, which by the way is faster, and you can install from there. And of course, we have the over-the-network installs where you connect to a share and you install it that way. So the network-based installation or the one-by-one installation is still out there because there is still a need. But in this particular case, we're doing a network-based installation without the need of any of that media. We don't have to share a DVD, we don't have to use a USB. All of that is taken care of because we're pulling the full image across the network. Now, in order to get Windows deployment services on your server, the first thing I'll say is it does take a little bit of planning. It's not something we randomly put on. If you look at the role itself, the role itself doesn't take a whole lot of disk space and it also doesn't take a whole lot of time. The part that you have to plan is that it has to be on an NTFS partition in order to store those images on the NTFS partition. But as well, those images take a lot of space. So think through what you would actually use this for and where your storage is. The install itself is easy. The planning and making sure it's on the right server with the right amount of speed and space is the more difficult part. So to install it, you go to server manager. You simply go to add roles. When you add the role, you'll see Windows deployment services. It'll automatically pick up on the two role services, which is transport and deployment. And again, you can install transport independently if you need it for a different application. But if you're looking for deployment services, you need that in deployment services. And of course, if you want to install it a PowerShell, you can certainly do that. There are plenty of PowerShell command that's to help you out. We have a few slides here that I've titled functionality. And I kind of left out some of the older operating systems like the Vista and the Windows XP. Technically, if you go up to Microsoft and you look for some of this information, it's still out there. We can certainly deploy a Windows XP workstation. But just in the matter of time and focus of the class, I'm focusing on the functionality of what we would consider recent operating systems. So, if you're looking for operating systems deployed and you're deploying this from a server 2008, now we're looking at the WDS server version. We're not looking at the operating system that you're deploying, but what the WDS server version is. If you're running 2008, you can actually install a Windows 2000 box. I don't know quite yet why you would want to, but you can. Now, what I'd like you to notice is I did try to make a couple notes so that things popped out, a newer changed feature. That's actually, it's not really new or changed, but it's the fact that that's probably the last time you're gonna see that here on a deployment option. WDS 2008, you can deploy Windows XP, server 2003, we get Vista, server 2008, Windows 7, and 2008 R2. Now, shortly after 2008, we had the giant service pack of life, which was big enough for us to name server 2008 R2, release two. If you happen to be running R2, notice 2000 is no longer there, but you can do XP, server 2003. We can do Vista, but it has to be service pack one. Notice there's no service pack one here. Server 2008, Windows 7, 2008 R2. If your WDS server is 2012, notice we still have a lot of these oldy boogoodies. We could still deal with Vista at service pack one, but really the big focus is with WDS 2012, we've added in support for Windows 8 and server 2012. Now, the image types that are gonna be deployed, well, we have .wims if you're dealing with a new install, and you happen to be building this in WDS 2008, but we used to have our RIS server and RIS had RI prep images, so if you still have RI prep images and you need to deploy them or would like to redeploy them, they can be converted if you've upgraded to this version of WDS. If you're running WDS 2008 R2, we can still handle Wims. We can now deploy based on VHDs, and the VHD for server 2008 R2 can only work if it's part of an unattended install, it's command line only, and again, the VHD images are only used if you're booting from that virtual hard drive, but they're not what's being applied directly to the actual machine volume. If we're working with WDS 2012, we have Wim, you can actually manage VHDs now, we have a new format of VHD called VHDX, and here, VHDX files, we can do direct installs over multicast or we can boot right to them. So just continuing a little further, WDS 2008, you boot to Windows PE, you'll see that's pretty consistent. In order to administrate it, you have an MMC, so again, that's pretty consistent. For the multicast, for sending those images out, we're gonna support for install images and their boot.Wim, boot.Wim can come from any of these. Now, boot.Wim is a file that you're gonna find on the actual installation media in a sources subdirectory on any one of these servers. So if I go out and buy server 2008 and I look on the install media, you'll see that folder called sources, and that's where we're gonna dig these out from. R2, we can now do a boot.Wim. So notice we have Vista 2008, 7 or 2008 R2, we're no longer using boot.Wim from O3. And for multicast, here's where we've got a lot of changes here. We can actually do trivial FTP if you have IP6 and DHCP version six. We don't have to have a local copy of install.Wim and the big point here is it really decreases in that deployment time because they arrange the block size for the hardware. Also last but certainly not least, going back to R2. When you're looking at multicasting, I didn't mention that we have support for boot images with EFI, but that's only at the command line. We have disconnect for sole clients, we can divide transmissions, we even have IP6 multicasting. Last but certainly not least in the event that I'm slowly losing you and you're sleeping, it's time to wake up. Let's talk about just a couple more things. We have driver provisioning, never supported here. We can now deploy driver packages with R2. And now here, they've done a really nice job. We can actually divide the drivers by manufacturer model and device groups. So we actually have a whole organizational structure that supports them. As far as extensibility, we had some custom PXE in providers. But the one thing we had is the lack of ability to have a way to have custom multicast boot clients and we've resolved that problem here. And it's still resolved here. But now what we get is of course, we still have custom PXE providers that we can use and we can do custom multicast providers. And lastly, we have EFI. I mentioned that on the last slide. It is known for extensible firmware interface. We have that in terms of network boot, Fritanium-based and 64-bit. We now have that as well, but we've added some functionality with DHCP referrals. We can boot our image deployment with multicasting. And what I always find was fun is now that server 2012 is almost all 64-bit, now we can of course support x86 clients with EFI. So let's talk about what we need to think about plan for and ensure we have on a prerequisite basis for WDS. Before you install WDS, you have to have the infrastructure behind you. Now let's think about what it takes to boot up an image without even discussing infrastructure. So you're sitting in a blank bare metal machine. You want to boot to a server. Somehow, if it's a bare metal machine without an operating system, we have to still boot into something. We have to have an IP address so something can be translated to us or transferred to us. And we have to have the permission to bring that image down. So in mere description alone, let's talk about the infrastructure. Well, you do need Active Directory, Directory Services. So the WDS server can be a member server or it can also be a domain controller. Now all domain and forest versions support WDS. So it doesn't matter at what level or functionality you have it. So that's gonna handle the permission and the user accounts and the computer account as you're booting it up, installing and joining a domain. DHCP is needed because when you boot up, you need an IP address to see anything on the network. So you have to have a DHCP server with an active scope and WDS will rely on the Pixie Boot. And a Pixie Boot is a special network card that knows to boot up and look for a DHCP server for an IP address. You of course need DNS. DNS is everything. DNS is how you find your Active Directory server. That's how you find anything by name. So you have to make sure that you have DNS infrastructure up and running. The good news is you wouldn't have Active Directory without it. You also need NTFS volume. All images are stored on NTFS. We need that because of some of the extended services that NTFS has, as well as the permission based that we need to assign permission to the volumes. And lastly, credentials. So in order for you to install the role for WDS, you have to be in the local administrators group. Now, anyone in a domain users group can be there in order to initialize the server, but you have to be a local admin to install it. Well, what if you're installing WDS in a standalone environment? Meaning you don't have Active Directory, you don't have all this wonderful infrastructure that I've been talking about. You can install WDS all by itself in its known as standalone mode. You still need DHCP in the background because it has to have that active scope and we're still relying on Pixie to boot up and grab an IP address. You still need DNS so that it can find its resources and you need that NTFS volume to store all of your images. In terms of credentials, you have to be a local administrator on that server in order to install the role. What if you like PowerShell or you want to script it or you're trying to put this on Windows Core? You can install WDS with PowerShell. In fact, you can do anything with PowerShell really in the Windows Server 2012 environment. So make sure when you run PowerShell, you run it as an administrator and then your command-lit, verb-noun, install-windows-feature, give it a name, dash-name, it's WDS and you can specify the computer name you're installing it on in the fact that you want management tools. So here we could do a little bit of remote management as long as remote administration services is turned on but if we don't cover computer name and you're at the actual server, then I would do install-windows-feature. The name of the feature is WDS. Make sure you include the management tools. Now, there's a little bit of a difference between PowerShell 1 and 2 and PowerShell 3. If you're using PowerShell 3, there is no need to import the server-manager-command-lit. So it used to be that we import server-manager and that command-lit kind of sets up the session and then you could go ahead and do what you would typically do in server-manager like install a role. So you don't need to do that on PowerShell 3.0 and the good news is that's what's coming with server 2012. So it's good to know if you're on a remote machine why the command didn't work. Always remember PowerShell command-lets are not case sensitive. So you'll see here we do use proper case but personally I just think it's certainly a lot easier to read than if it was all caps or all lower case. Now if you're in PowerShell and you say install feature WDS include management tools, then it is going to install both the deployment server and the transport server modules for you. It won't really give you that choice. In order to configure the WDS role, you can do this by either running the WDS configuration wizard. So as you install the role, you'll get that little indicator that says you still have something left to do and if you follow those links, you'll go right into the wizard. You can also run WDS util to do the exact same thing and once you have these wizards up and running, the absolute first thing you have to do is to put in at least one boot image. Now that boot image, boot.wm is right on the server 2012 CD or installation source in the sources subdirectory. Now for the client computers, it has to be pixie enabled. Pixie is your pre execution environment, which means a network card can actually boot up and get an IP address independent of an operating system. So they have to be pixie enabled in order to do that and they also have to be running the latest version of Windows PE and again, the client computers, we have our boot.wm that's gonna help with this whole process or you can have a boot disk that boots them into PE and attaches to the WDS server. Also, if you need a little help with this and certainly 90% of us do, you can always review the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit and that's called the ADK for Windows 8 and yes, I know I said Windows 8, but it includes what you need to know for 2012. Give it a read and it'll give you a lot of good base information on the roles and how to work around your clients.