When planning for the build of a new server, many of the decisions that you need to make are licensing-type decisions. What roles do you intend to install on this server? Do they require a special edition? Can the more common Server 2025 Standard edition handle it, or do we need the Datacenter edition for our purposes? Is Server Core going to be beneficial from a security perspective, or do we need the full Desktop Experience? In these days of Hyper-V servers having the ability to spin up virtual machines on a whim, we often proceed without much consideration of the hardware of a server, but there are certainly still instances where physical equipment will be responsible for hosting the Windows Server 2025 operating system.

In these cases, you need to be aware of the requirements for this new platform, so let us take a minute to list those specifics. This information is available in longer form on the Microsoft Learn website if you need to double-check any...

In general, the installation process for Microsoft OSs has improved dramatically over the past 20 years. I assume that a lot of you, as IT professionals, are also the de facto neighborhood computer guru, constantly asked by friends and family to fix or rebuild their computers. If you’re anything like me, this means you are still occasionally rebuilding operating systems such as Windows 7, maybe even XP. Looking at the bright blue setup screens and finding a keyboard with the F8 key are imperative to this process. To spend two hours simply installing the base OS and bringing it up to the highest service pack level is pretty normal. Compared to that timeline, installing a modern OS such as Windows Server 2025 is almost unbelievably fast and simple.

It is very likely that many of you have completed this process numerous times already, and if that is the case, feel free to skip ahead a couple of pages. But for anyone new to the Microsoft world...

Installing the OS 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 OS is generally all that is needed 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 OS. This is where we need to utilize roles and features.

Windows Server 2025 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 roles or stand on their own. There are...

Whether you are installing new roles, running backups and maintenance programs, or troubleshooting and repairing a server, it is common sense that the first thing you would do is log directly into the server that you need to work on. Long ago, this meant walking up to the server and logging on with the keyboard and mouse that were plugged directly into that hardware. Then, quite a number of years ago, this became cumbersome, and technology 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 and secure protocol, giving us the ability to quickly connect to servers from the comfort of our desks. 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...

Now, forget everything I just told you about remote server management and focus on this instead. I’m kidding… sort of. All of the tools we have already discussed are still stable, relevant, and great ways to interact with and manage Windows Server. However, there are a couple of newer offerings from Microsoft that tackle the idea of centralized server management in a whole new way. The first of these is the Windows Admin Center (WAC).

WAC is a server and client management platform that is designed to help you administer your machines in a more efficient manner. This is a browser-based tool, meaning that, once installed, you access WAC from a web browser, which is great. No need to install a management tool or application onto your workstation—simply sit down and tap into it with a URL.

WAC can manage your servers (all the way back to Server 2008 R2) and your server clusters, and even has some special functionality for managing hyper...

Another place you may have noticed the word “Azure,” even in some of our screenshots of WAC, are references to Azure Arc that are showing up all over the place. As we already discussed a little bit in Chapter 1, Azure Arc is another centralized administration pane that can be used to manage Azure servers, of course, but also on-premise servers and infrastructure. Azure Arc is accessed through your company’s Azure portal, and not all companies are yet tapped into Azure, so you may or may not have access to look inside this toolset.

While this book is not inherently about Azure technologies, a couple of great reasons you may want to enable Azure Arc in your environment and begin tying your servers into it are pay-as-you-go licensing and hotpatching. We also discussed both of these in Chapter 1, but as a quick refresher, new instances of Windows Server 2025 can now be licensed based on usage, via pay-as-you-go licensing. This can remove your capex costs...

At the beginning of this chapter, we walked through the process of installing the Windows Server 2025 OS onto your new server. Whether this was a physical piece of hardware or a virtual machine that we were working with, the installation process was essentially the same. Plugging in the DVD or USB stick, booting to it, and letting the installer run its course is an easy enough thing to do, but what if you need to build out 10 new servers instead of just 1? This process would soon start to get tedious, 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 you...

Before wrapping up this chapter, let’s enter into this taboo topic. As technology consumers, we are very much used to the idea of in-place upgrades. In fact, we expect them to work flawlessly, and we whine and complain when they don’t. iPhone operating systems, Android version updates, Windows feature pack installations, and even something like a Windows 7 to Windows 10 upgrade are all expected to work seamlessly after a couple of simple pushes of a button. Those of us who have worked in Windows Server administration for more than a few years do NOT have this same mindset about server upgrades. For so many years, it was normal that in-place Windows Server upgrades were almost guaranteed to tank your server, causing it to be useless in the end. Due to this, server upgrades almost always meant replacing the server rather than upgrading it. You would leave the production server running, spin up a new one in parallel, configure all...

Anyone interested in being a Windows Server administrator needs to be comfortable with installing and managing servers, and covering those topics establishes an important baseline for moving forward. It is quite common in today’s IT world for new OS releases to be thoroughly tested by companies before deploying them, 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 to accomplish such testing of the Windows Server 2025 OS in your environment, you will burn 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...

Put your knowledge to the test with the following questions. If you need a hand (or just want to double-check), you’ll find all the answers in the Appendix section of the book.

1. What is the name of the web-based, centralized server management tool from Microsoft (fun fact, this toolset was originally known as Project Honolulu)?
2. True or False? Windows Server 2025 needs to be installed on rack-mount server hardware.
3. True or False? By choosing the default installation option for Windows Server 2025, you will end up with a user interface that looks quite like Windows 11.
4. What is the PowerShell cmdlet that displays currently installed roles and features in Windows Server 2025?
5. True or False? Server Manager can be used to manage many different servers at the same time.
6. What is the name of the toolset that can be installed on a Windows 11 computer in order to run Server Manager on that client workstation?
7. Which built-in tool...