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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
A comprehensive and practical guide to Windows Server 2016
About This Book
- In-depth coverage of new features of Windows Server 2016
- Gain the necessary skills and knowledge to design and implement Microsoft Server 2016 in enterprise environment
- Know how you can support your medium to large enterprise and leverage your experience in administering Microsoft Server 2016,
- A practical guide to administering Windows server 2016
Who This Book Is For
The book is targeted at System Administrators and IT professionals who would like to design and deploy Windows Server 2016 (physical and logical) Enterprise infrastructure. Previous experience of Windows Server operating systems and familiarity with networking concepts is assumed. System administrators who are upgrading or migrating to Windows Server 2016 would also find this book useful.
What You Will Learn
- Familiarize yourself with Windows Server 2016 ideology, the core of most datacenters running today
- New functions and benefits provided only by the new Windows Server 2016
- Get comfortable working with Nanoserver
- Secure your network with new technologies in Server 2016
- Harden your Windows Servers to help keep those bad guys out!
- Using new built-in integration for Docker with this latest release of Windows Server 2016
- Virtualize your datacenter with Hyper-V
In Detail
Windows Server 2016 is the server operating system developed by Microsoft as part of the Windows NT family of operating systems, developed concurrently with Windows 10. With Windows Server 2016, Microsoft has gotten us thinking outside of the box for what it means to be a system administration, and comes with some interesting new capabilities. These are exciting times to be or to become a server administrator!
This book covers all aspects of administration level tasks and activities required to gain expertise in Microsoft Windows Server 2016. You will begin by getting familiar and comfortable navigating around in the interface. Next, you will learn to install and manage Windows Server 2016 and discover some tips for adapting to the new server management ideology that is all about centralized monitoring and configuration.
You will deep dive into core Microsoft infrastructure technologies that the majority of companies are going to run on Server 2016. Core technologies such as Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, Certificate Services, File Services, and more. We will talk about networking in this new operating system, giving you a networking toolset that is useful for everyday troubleshooting and maintenance. Also discussed is the idea of Software Defined Networking. You will later walk through different aspects of certificate administration in Windows Server 2016. Three important and crucial areas to cover in the Remote Access role -- DirectAccess, VPN, and the Web Application Proxy -- are also covered.
You will then move into security functions and benefits that are available in Windows Server 2016. Also covered is the brand new and all-important Nano Server!
We will incorporate PowerShell as a central platform for performing many of the functions that are discussed in this book, including a chapter dedicated to the new PowerShell 5.0. Additionally, you will learn about the new built-in integration for Docker with this latest release of Windows Server 2016. The book ends with a discussion and information on virtualizing your datacenter with Hyper-V.
By the end of this book, you will have all the ammunition required to start planning for and implementing Windows Server 2016.
Style and approach
This book offers a practical and wide coverage of all features of brand new Microsoft Server 2016 along with tips on daily administration tasks.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Table of Contents
Mastering Windows Server 2016
Mastering Windows Server 2016
Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: October 2016
Production reference: 1191016
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
Livery Place
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Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.
ISBN 978-1-78588-890-8
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Credits
Author
Jordan Krause
Reviewer
Anderson Patricio
Commissioning Editor
Kartikey Pandey
Acquisition Editor
Meeta Rajani
Technical Editor
Pankaj Kadam
Copy Editor
Laxmi Subramanian
Proofreader
Safis Editing
Indexer
Rekha Nair
Production Coordinator
Shraddha Falebhai
Cover Work
Shraddha Falebhai
About the Author
Jordan Krause is a Microsoft MVP in the Cloud and Datacenter Management - Enterprise Security group. He has the unique opportunity to work daily with Microsoft networking technologies as a senior engineer at IVO Networks. Jordan specializes in Microsoft DirectAccess, and has authored one of the only books available worldwide on this subject. Additional writings include books on Windows Server 2012 R2 and the new Windows Server 2016. He spends the majority of each workday planning, designing, and implementing DirectAccess and VPN solutions for companies around the world.
Committed to continuous learning, Jordan holds Microsoft certifications as an MCP, MCTS, MCSA, and MCITP Enterprise Administrator. He regularly writes tech notes and articles reflecting his experiences with the Microsoft networking technologies, which can be found at http://www.ivonetworks.com/news.
Jordan also strives to spend time helping the DirectAccess community, mostly by way of the Microsoft TechNet forums. Always open to direct contact, he encourages anyone needing assistance to head over to the forums and find him personally. Jordan lives and works in the ever-changing climate that is Michigan.
About the Reviewer
Anderson Patricio is a Canadian Microsoft MVP, and is an IT consultant based in Toronto. His areas of expertise are Microsoft Exchange, Skype for Business, Azure, System Center, and Active Directory.
Anderson is an active member of the Exchange Community and he contributes to forums, blogs, articles, and videos. In English, he contributes regularly at ITPROCentral.com, MSexchange.org, and TechGenix.com. In Portuguese, his website, http://www.AndersonPatricio.org, contains thousands of Microsoft Tutorials to help the local community, alongside his speaking engagements at TechED in South America and MVA Academy training courses. You can follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/apatricio.
He has reviewed several books, such as Windows PowerShell in Action, Bruce Payette and PowerShell in Practice, Richard Siddaway by Manning Publications, and Microsoft Exchange 2010 PowerShell Cookbook, Mike Pfeiffer by Packt Publishing.
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Preface
We are in the year 2016. In fact, we are almost towards the end of it! How amazing to look back and reflect on all of the big changes that have happened in technology over the past 15 years. In some ways, it seems that Y2K has just happened and everyone has been scrambling to make sure their DOS-based and green screen applications are prepared to handle four-digit date ranges. It seems unthinkable to us now that these systems could have been created in a way that was so short-sighted. Did we not think the world would make it to the year 2000? Today, we build technology with such a different perspective and focus. Everything is centralized, redundant, global, and cloud driven. Users expect 100% uptime, from wherever they are, on whatever device that happens to be sitting in front of them. The world has truly changed.
And as the world has changed, so has the world of technology infrastructure. This year, we are introduced to Microsoft's Windows Server 2016. Yes, we have officially rolled past the half-way marker of this decade and are quickly on our way to 2020, which has always sounded so futuristic. We are living in and beyond Doc and Marty's future, we are actually testing hoverboards, and even some of the wardrobe predictions given to us through cinema no longer seem so far-fetched.
From a user's perspective, a consumer of data, backend computing requirements are almost becoming irrelevant. Things such as maintenance windows, scheduled downtime, system upgrades, slowness due to a weak infrastructure – these items have to become invisible to the workforce. We are building our networks in ways that allow knowledgeworkers and developers to do their jobs without consideration for what is supporting their job functions. What do we use to support that level of reliability and resiliency? Our datacenters haven't disappeared. Just because we use the words "cloud" and "private cloud" so often doesn't make it magic. What makes all of this centralized, "spin up what you need" mentality happen is still physical servers running in physical datacenters.
What drives the processing power of these datacenters for most companies in the world? Windows Server. In fact, I recently attended a Microsoft conference that had many talks and sessions about Azure, Microsoft's cloud resource center. Azure is enormous, offering us all kinds of technologies and leading the edge as far as cloud computing and security technologies. I was surprised in these talks to hear Windows Server 2016 being referenced time and time again. Why were Azure presenters talking about Server 2016? Because Windows Server 2016—the same Server 2016 that you will be installing into your datacenters—is what underpins all of Azure. It is truly ready to service even the heaviest workloads, in the newest cloud-centric ways. Over the last handful of years, we have all become familiar with Software-Defined Computing, using virtualization technology to turn our server workloads into a software layer. Now we are hearing more and more about expanding on this idea with new technologies such as Software-Defined Networking and Software-Defined Storage, enhancing our ability to virtualize and share resources at a grand scale.
In order to make our workloads more flexible and cloud-ready, Microsoft has taken some major steps in shrinking the server platforms themselves and creating brand new ways of interfacing with those servers. We are talking about things like Server Core, Nano Server, Containers, Hyper-V Containers, and the Server Management Tools. Windows Server 2016 brings us many new capabilities, and along with those capabilities come many new acronyms and terminology.
Let's take some time together to explore the inner workings of the newest version of this server operating system, which will drive and support so many of our business infrastructures over the coming years. Windows Servers have dominated our datacenter's rackspaces for more than two decades, will this newest iteration in the form of Windows Server 2016 continue that trend?
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Getting Started with Windows Server 2016, gives us an introduction to the new operating system and an overhead view of the new technologies and capabilities that it can provide. We will also spend a little bit of time exploring the new interface for those who may not be comfortable with it yet.
Chapter 2, Installing and Managing Windows Server 2016, dives right into the very first thing we will have to do when working with Server 2016, install it! From there, we will start to expand upon Microsoft's centralized management mentality, exploring the ways that we can now manage and interact with our servers without ever having to log into them.
Chapter 3, Core Infrastructure Services, gives us a solid baseline on the technologies that make up the infrastructure of any Microsoft-centric network. We will discuss the "big three"—AD, DNS, and DHCP—and also address some Server Backup capabilities as well as a cheat-sheet list of MMC and MSC shortcuts to make your day job easier.
Chapter 4, Certificates in Windows Server 2016, jumps into one of the pieces of Windows Server that has existed for many years and yet the majority of server administrators that I meet are unfamiliar with. Let's take a closer look at certificates as they become more and more commonly required for the new technologies that we roll out. By the end of this chapter you should be able to spin up your own PKI and start issuing certificates for free!
Chapter 5, Networking with Windows Server 2016, begins with an introduction to that big scary IPv6, and continues from there into building a toolbox of items that are built into Windows Server 2016 and can be used in your daily networking tasks. We will also discuss Software-Defined Networking.
Chapter 6, Enabling Your Mobile Workforce, takes a look at the three remote access technologies that are built into Windows Server 2016. Follow along as we explore the capabilities provided by VPN, DirectAccess, and the Web Application Proxy.
Chapter 7, Hardening and Security, gives some insight into security and encryption functions that are built into Windows Server 2016. Security is the top focus of CIOs everywhere this year, let's explore what protection mechanisms are available to us out of the box.
Chapter 8, Tiny Servers, throws us into the shrinking world of headless servers. We will take a look at both Server Core, which has existed for years unbeknownst to many IT personnel, and also at Nano Server, which is brand new for Server 2016.
Chapter 9, Redundancy in Windows Server 2016, takes a look at two different platforms in Server 2016 that provide powerful data and computing redundancy. Follow along as we discuss Network Load Balancing as well as Failover Clustering.
Chapter 10, Learning PowerShell 5.0, gets us into the new, blue command-line interface so that we can become comfortable using it, and also learn why it is so much more powerful than command prompt. PowerShell is quickly becoming an indispensable tool for administering servers, especially if you are interested in Nano Server.
Chapter 11, Application Containers and Docker, brings the terms open source and Linux into a Microsoft book! Let's figure out together why Microsoft thinks this new containers thing is going to be such a big deal, and try out some of the new tools that we will have to learn in order to start using these containers to enhance our DevOps story.
Chapter 12, Virtualizing Your Datacenter with Hyper-V, covers a no-brainer topic to learn when working in a Microsoft network. Organizations have been moving their servers over to virtual machines in mass quantities over the past few years. Let's use this chapter to make sure you understand how that hypervisor works and gives you the resources needed to build and manage one if and when you have the need.
What you need for this book
Each technology that we discuss within the pages of this book is included in or relates directly to Windows Server 2016. If you can get your hands on a piece of server hardware and the Server 2016 installer files, you will be equipped to follow along and try these things out for yourself. We will talk about and reference some enterprise-class technologies that require stiffer infrastructure requirements, and so you may have to put the actual testing of those items on hold until you are working in a more comprehensive test lab or environment, but the concepts are all still included in this book.
We will also discuss some items that are not included in Server 2016 itself, but are used to extend the capabilities and features of it. Some of these items are provided to us by Azure, such as the Server Management Tools, and some are provided by third parties, such as in the case of using Docker to interact with your containers. Ultimately, you do not need to use these tools in order to manage your new Windows Server 2016 environment, but they do enable some pretty cool things that I think you will want to look into.
Who this book is for
Anyone interested in Windows Server 2016 or in learning more in general about a Microsoft-centric datacenter will benefit from this book. An important deciding factor when choosing which content was appropriate for such a volume was making sure that anyone who had a baseline in working with computers could pick this up and start making use of it within their own networks. If you are already proficient in the Microsoft infrastructure technologies and have worked with prior versions of Windows Server, there are some focused topics on the parts and pieces that are brand new only in Server 2016. On the other hand, if you are currently in a desktop support role or if you are coming fresh into the IT workforce, care was taken in the pages of this book to ensure that you will receive a rounded understanding not only of what is brand new in Server 2016, but what core capabilities it includes that are carry-over from the previous versions of the operating system, but are still critical knowledge to have when working in a Microsoft-driven datacenter.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Now instead of using a simple dir, give this command a try: Dir | Format-List."
A block of code is set as follows:
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Next you simply press the Submit button."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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Chapter 1. Getting Started with Windows Server 2016
A number of years ago, Microsoft adjusted its operating system release ideology so that the latest Windows Server operating system is always being structured very similarly to the latest Windows client operating system. This has been the trend for some time now, with Server 2008 R2 closely reflecting Windows 7, Server 2012 feeling a lot like Windows 8, and many of the same usability features that came with the Windows 8.1 update are also included with Server 2012 R2. Given this, it makes sense that the new Windows Server 2016 will look and feel much like a Windows 10 experience because that just released last year. Many folks who I work with and have talked to have not yet test driven Windows 10 in their own networks, and are not overly familiar with the interface, so it is important to establish a baseline for usability and familiarity in the operating system itself before diving deeper into the technologies running under the hood. Let's spend a few minutes exploring the new graphical interface and options that are available for finding your way around this latest release of Windows Server.
What is the purpose of Windows Server?
Silly question? I don't think so. A good question to ponder, especially now that the definition for servers and server workloads is changing on a regular basis. The answer to this question for Windows clients is simpler. A Windows client machine is a requestor, consumer, and contributor of data.
From where is this data being pushed and pulled? What enables the mechanisms and applications running on the client operating systems to interface with this data? What secures these users and their data? This is the purpose of servers in general. They are housing, protecting, and serving up the data to be consumed by clients. Everything revolves around data in business today. Our e-mail, documents, databases, customer lists, everything that we need to do business well, is data. Data that is critical to us. Servers are what we use to build the fabric upon which we trust our data to reside.
We traditionally think about servers in a client-server interface mentality. A user opens a program on their client computer, this program reaches out to a server in order to retrieve something, and the server responds as needed. This idea can be correctly applied to just about every transaction you may have with a server. When your domain-joined computer needs to authenticate you as a user, it reaches out to Active Directory on the server to validate your credentials and get an authentication token. When you need to contact a resource by name, your computer asks a DNS server how to get there. If you need to open a file, you ask the file server to send it your way. Servers are designed to be the brains of our operation, and often by doing so transparently. Especially, in recent years, large strides have been taken to ensure resources are always available and accessible in ways that don't require training or large effort on the part of our employees.
In most organizations, many different servers are needed in order to provide your workforce with the capabilities they require. Each service inside Windows Server is provided as, or as part of, a Role. When you talk about needing new servers or configuring a new server for any particular task, what you are really referring to is the individual role or roles that are going to be configured on that server in order to get the work done. A server without any roles installed is useless, though depending on the chassis can make an excellent paperweight.
If you think of roles as the meat and potatoes of a server, then the next bit we will discuss is sort of like adding salt and pepper. Beyond the overhead roles you will install and configure on your servers, Windows also contains many Features that can be installed, which sometimes stand alone, but more often complement specific roles in the operating system. Features may be something that complements and adds functionality to the base operating system such as Telnet Client, or a feature may be added to a server in order to enhance an existing role, such as adding the Network Load Balancing feature to an already-equipped remote access server. The combination of roles and features inside Windows Server is what equips that piece of metal to do work.
This book will, quite obviously, focus on a Microsoft-centric infrastructure. In these environments, the Windows Server operating system is king, and is prevalent across all facets of technology. There are alternatives to Windows Server, and different products which can provide some of the same functions to an organization, but it is quite rare to find a business environment anywhere that is running without some semblance of a Microsoft infrastructure. Windows Server contains an incredible amount of technology, all wrapped up in one small installation disk. With Windows Server 2016, Microsoft has gotten us thinking out of the box for what it means to be a server in the first place, and comes with some exciting new capabilities that we will spend some time covering in these pages. Things like PowerShell and Nano Server are changing the way that we manage and size our computing environments; these are exciting times to be or to become a server administrator!
It's getting "cloudy" out there
There's this new term out there, you may have heard of it—Cloud. While the word cloud has certainly turned into a buzzword that is often misused and spoken of inappropriately, the idea of cloud infrastructure is an incredibly powerful one. A cloud fabric is one that revolves around virtual resources—virtual machines, virtual disks, and even virtual networks. Being plugged into the cloud typically enables things like the ability to spin up new servers on a whim, or even the ability for particular services themselves to increase or decrease their needed resources automatically, based on utilization. Think of a simple e-commerce website where a consumer can go to order goods. Perhaps 75% of the year they can operate this website on a single web server with limited resources, resulting in a fairly low cost of service. But the other 25% of the year, maybe around the holiday seasons, utilization ramps way up, requiring much more computing power.
Prior to cloud mentality, this would mean that the company would need to have their environment sized to fit the maximum requirements all the time, in case it was ever needed. They would be paying for more servers and much more computing power than was needed for the majority of the year. With a cloud fabric, giving the website the ability to increase or decrease the number of servers it has at its disposal as needed, the total cost of such a website or service can be drastically decreased. This is the major driving factor of cloud in business today.
Private cloud
While most people working in the IT sector these days have a pretty good understanding of what it means to be part of a cloud service, and many are indeed doing so today, a term which is being pushed into enterprises everywhere and is still many times misunderstood is private cloud. At first, I took this to be a silly marketing ploy, a gross misuse of the term cloud to try and appeal to those hooked by buzzwords. Boy was I wrong. In the early days of private clouds, the technology wasn't quite ready to stand up to what was being advertised. Today, however, that story has changed. It is now entirely possible to take the same fabric that is running up in the true, public cloud, and install that fabric right inside your datacenter. This enables you to provide your company with cloud benefits such as the ability to spin resources up and down, and to run everything virtualized, and to implement all of the neat tips and tricks of cloud environments, with all of the serving power and data storage remaining locally owned and secured by you. Trusting cloud storage companies to keep data safe and secure is absolutely one of the biggest blockers to implementation on the true public cloud, but by installing your own private cloud, you get the best of both worlds. Stretchable compute environments with the security of knowing you still control and own all of your own data.
This is not a book about clouds, public or private. I mention this to give a baseline for some of the items we will discuss in later chapters, and also to get your mouth watering a little bit to dig in and do a little reading yourself on cloud technology. You will see the Windows Server 2016 interface in many new ways with the cloud, and will notice that so many of the underlying systems available in Server 2016 are similar if not the same as those becoming available inside Microsoft Azure, which is Microsoft's cloud services platform. In these pages, we will not focus on the capabilities of Azure, but rather a more traditional sense of Windows Server that would be utilized on-premise. With the big push toward cloud technologies, it's easy to get caught with blinders on and think that everything and everyone is quickly running to the cloud for all of their technology needs, but it simply isn't true. Most companies will have the need for many on-premise servers for many years to come; in fact many may never put full trust in the cloud and will forever maintain their own datacenters. These datacenters will have local servers that will require server administrators to manage them. That is where you come in.
Navigating the interface
Unfortunately, Microsoft turned a lot of people off with the introduction of Windows 8 and Server 2012, not because functionality or reliability was lacking, but because the interface was so vastly different than it had been before. It was almost like running two separate operating systems at the same time. You had the normal desktop experience, in which all of us spent 99.9% of our time, but then there were also those few moments where you found yourself needing to visit the full page Start menu. More likely you stumbled into it without wanting to. However you ended up there, inside that fullscreen tablet interface, for the remaining 0.01% of your Server 2012 experience you were left confused, disturbed, and wishing you were back in the traditional desktop. I am, of course, speaking purely from experience here. There may be variance in your personal percentages of time spent, but based on the conversations I have been involved with, I am not alone in these views. And I haven't even mentioned the magical self-appearing Charms bar. Some bad memories are better left in the recesses of the brain.
The major update of Windows 8.1 and Server 2012 R2 came as a welcome relief to these symptoms. There was an actual Start button in the corner again, and you could choose to boot primarily into the normal desktop mode. However, should you ever have the need to click on that Start button, you found yourself right back in the full page Start screen, which I still find almost all server admins trying their best to avoid at all costs.
Well, it turns out that Microsoft has been listening because the interface in Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 seems to have found a very good balance.
The new Start menu
The first big difference you will recognize in Windows Server 2016 is the Start menu. There is a real Start button that now launches a real Start menu, and one that doesn't take over the entire desktop! Still skeptical? Here's a screenshot to prove it!
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Now that is a breath of fresh air. A simple Start menu, and more importantly one that loads quickly over remote connections such as RDP or Hyper-V consoles. No more waiting for screen painting of the full Start screen. If you click on All Apps, as expected you see all of the applications installed and available for you to open on the system. Right-clicking inside the blue area of the Start menu gives you options for personalization and properties so that you can adjust the location and presentation of the Start menu and taskbar to your liking.
The hidden Admin menu
As nice as it is to have a functional Start menu, as a server administrator I still very rarely find myself needing to access the traditional menu for my day-to-day functions. This is because many items that I need to access are quickly available to me inside the context menu, which opens by simply right-clicking on the Start button. This menu has been available to us since the release of Windows 8, but many IT professionals are still unaware of this functionality. This menu has become an important part of my interaction with Windows Server operating systems, and hopefully it will be for you as well. Right-clicking on the Start button shows us immediate quick links to do things like open the Event Viewer, view the system properties, check Device Manager, and even shut down or restart the server. The two most common functions that I call for in this context menu are the Run function and opening the Command Prompt. Even better is the ability from this menu to open either a regular user context Command Prompt, or an elevated/administrative Command Prompt. Using this menu properly saves many mouse clicks and shortens troubleshooting time.
Alternatively, this menu can be invoked using the WinKey + X keyboard shortcut!
Using the Search function
While the hidden context menu behind the Start button is useful for calling common administrative tasks, using the search function inside the Start menu is a powerful tool for interfacing with literally anything on your Windows Server. Depending on who installed applications and roles to your servers, you may or may not have shortcuts available to launch them inside the Start menu. You also may or may not have desktop shortcuts, or links to open these programs from the taskbar. I find that it is commonly difficult to find specific settings that may need to be tweaked in order to make our servers run like we want them to. The Control Panel
Using the new Settings screen
If you work in IT and have been using Windows 10 on a client machine for any amount of time, it's a sure bet that you have stumbled across the new Settings interface. Perhaps accidentally, as was the case for me, the first time I saw it. I have watched a number of people now bump into the Settings interface for the first time when trying to view or configure Windows Updates. You see, settings in Windows Server 2016 are just what the name implies, an interface from which you configure various settings within the operating system. What's so hard or confusing about that? Well, we already have a landing platform for all of the settings contained inside Windows that has been around for a zillion years. It's called Control Panel.
The Settings menu inside Windows isn't a brand new idea, but looks and feels quite new for Server 2016. Our predecessor, Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2, had a quasi-presence of settings that as far as I know went largely unused by systems administrators. I believe that to be the effect of poor execution as the Settings menu in 2012 was accessed and hidden behind the Charms bar, which most folks have decided was a terrible idea. Not to spend too much time on technology of the past, but the Charms bar in Server 2012 was a menu that presented itself when you swiped your finger in from the right edge of the screen. Yes, you are correct, servers don't have touchscreens. Not any that I have ever worked on, anyway. So the Charms bar also presented when you hovered the mouse up near the top-right of the screen. It was quite difficult to access, yet seemed to show up whenever you didn't want it to, like when you were trying to click on something near the right of the desktop and instead you clicked on something inside the Charms bar that suddenly appeared.
I am only giving you this background information in order to segue into this next idea. Much of the user interface in Windows 10, and therefore Windows Server 2016, can be considered a small step backward from the realm of finger swipes and touch screens. Windows 8 and Server 2012 were so focused on big app buttons and finger swipes that a lot of people got lost in the shuffle. It was so different than what we had ever seen before and difficult to use at an administrative level. Because of feedback received from that release, the graphical interface and user controls, including both the Start menu and the Settings menu in Windows Server 2016, are sort of smack-dab in the middle between Server 2008 and Server 2012. This backwards step was the right one, and I have heard nothing but praise so far on the new user interface.
So, getting back to the Settings menu, if you click on your Start button, then All Apps, and then on Settings, you will see this new interface:
There are many settings and pieces of the operating system that you can configure in this new Settings
Task Manager
Task Manager is a tool that has existed in all Windows operating systems since the first days of the graphical interface, but it has evolved quite a bit over the years. One of the goals for Windows Server 2016 is to be even more useful and reliable than any previous version of Windows Server has been. So, it only makes sense that we finally remove Task Manager altogether, since it simply won't be needed anymore, right?
I'm kidding, of course! While Server 2016 will hopefully prove itself to indeed be the most stable and least needy operating system we have ever seen from Microsoft, Task Manager still exists and will still be needed by server administrators everywhere. If you haven't taken a close look at Task Manager in a while, it has changed significantly over the past few releases.
Task Manager is still typically invoked by either a Ctrl + Alt + Delete on your keyboard and then clicking on Task Manager, or by right-clicking on the taskbar and then choosing Task Manager. You can also launch Task Manager with the key combination Ctrl + Shift + Esc, or typing taskmgr inside the Run or Search dialog boxes. The first thing you'll notice is that very little information exists in this default view, only a simple list of applications that are currently running. This is a useful interface for forcing an application to close which may be hung up, but not for much else. Go ahead and click on the More details link, and you will start to see the real information provided in this more powerful interface.
We immediately notice that the displayed information is more user-friendly than in previous years, with both Apps and Background processes being categorized in a more intuitive way, and multiple instances of the same application being condensed down for easy viewing. This gives a faster overhead view of what is going on with our system, while still giving the ability to expand each application or process to see what individual components or windows are running within the application, such as in the following screenshot:
Make sure to check out the other tabs available inside Task Manager as well. Users will show us a list of currently logged in users and the amounts of hardware resources that their user sessions are consuming. This is a nice way to identify on a Remote Desktop Session Host server, for example, an individual who might be causing a slowdown on the server. The Details tab is a little bit more of a traditional view of the Processes tab, splitting out much of the same information but in the older style way we were used to seeing it in versions of the operating system long ago. And then the Services tab is pretty self-explanatory; it shows you the Windows services currently installed on the server, their status, and the ability to start or stop these services as needed, without having to open the Services console separately.
The tab that I skipped over so that I could mention it more specifically here is the Performance tab. This is a pretty powerful one. Inside you can quickly monitor CPU, memory, and Ethernet utilization. As you can see in the following screenshot, I haven't done a very good job of planning resources on this particular virtual machine, as my CPU is hardly being touched but I am almost out of system memory:
Tip
Another useful piece of information available inside this screen is server up time. Finding this information can be critical when troubleshooting an issue, and I watch admins time and time again calculating system uptime based on log timestamps. Using Task Manager is a much easier way to find that information!
If you are interested in viewing more in-depth data about server performance, there is a link at the bottom of this Task Manager window where you can Open Resource Monitor. Two technologies provided inside Server 2016 for monitoring system status, particularly for hardware performance, are Resource Monitor and Performance Monitor. Definitely open up these tools and start testing them out, as they can provide both troubleshooting information and essential baseline data when you spin up a new server. This baseline can then be compared against future testing data so that you can monitor how new applications or services installed onto a particular server have affected their resource consumption.
Moving back to Task Manager, there is just one other little neat trick I would like to test. Still inside the Performance tab, go ahead and right-click on any particular piece of data that you are interested in. I will right-click on the CPU information near the left side of the window. This opens up a dialog box with a few options, of which I am going to click on Summary view
Task View
Task View is a new feature in Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016. It is a similar idea as that of holding down the Alt key and then pressing Tab
