If you have worked on Windows Server recently, you are familiar with the idea that logging in to any of your servers automatically invokes a large window on top of the desktop. This auto-launching program is Server Manager. As the name implies, it’s here to help you manage your server. However, in my experience, the majority of server administrators do not utilize Server Manager. Instead, they close it as fast as they can and curse at it under their breath because it’s been popping up and annoying them during every server login for the past 10 years.

Using Server Manager on a single server to manage and monitor all of your servers is pretty handy, but what if we could take one more step out of that process? What if I told you that you didn’t have to log in to any of your servers, but could perform all of these tasks from the computer sitting on your desk? Continue to save yourself time and effort by creating new copies of your master images every few months. This way, the newest patches are always included in your master image, and it continues to save you more and more time throughout the life of Windows Server 2022. Running Sysprep to prepare and shut down your master server After launching this command, you will see Sysprep moving through some processes within Windows, and after a couple of minutes, your server will shut itself down, as shown in Figure 2.38: Monitoring information about your servers from a single place like WAC is great and powerful, but the coolest part about WAC is that you have some serious capabilities to manipulate your servers as well, straight from this web interface.generalize: This specifies that Sysprep is to remove all of the unique system information (SID) from the Windows installation, making the final image usable on multiple machines in your network because each new one spun up from the image will get a new, unique SID. The complete guide for system administrators to install, manage, secure, and squeeze return on investment from their Windows Server 2022 infrastructure New servers created from a sysprepped image file always receive a new hostname when they boot. This often confuses admins who might have named their master server something such as MASTER. After booting your new servers, you can expect to see randomized names on your new servers, and you will have to rename them according to their new duties in life. Make sure that your server does NOT boot into Windows again until after you have created your master image or taken your master copy of the .VHDX file. The first time that Windows boots, it will inject the new SID information, and you want that only to happen on new servers that you have created based on your new image. This is possible by installing a toolset from Microsoft called the Remote Server Administration Tools ( RSAT). I have a regular Windows 10 client computer online and running in our network, also domain-joined. I am now going to add an optional feature to this Windows 10 computer to give it the RSAT toolset.

In Mastering Windows Server 2022 with Azure Cloud Services: IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, 5-time Microsoft MVP Winner William Panek delivers a comprehensive and practical blueprint for planning, implementing, and managing environments that include Azure IaaS-hosted Windows Server-based workloads. Written by a 10-time Microsoft MVP award winner with over 20 years of IT experience, Mastering Windows Server 2022 is a hands-on guide to administer any Windows Server environment. Whether new to the server world or working to keep your existing skills sharp, this book aims to be referenced on a regular basis instead of gathering dust on your shelf. Stop doing that! It’s here to help, I promise. Figure 2.18 shows the default view of Server Manager on my new domain controller: Explorations of the tools you’ll need to implement Azure solutions, including Windows Admin Center and PowerShell You’ll learn to use the expansive, hybrid capabilities of Azure, how to migrate virtual and physical server workloads to Azure IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, and how to manage and secure Azure virtual machines running Windows Server 2022.You are now ready to create your master image from this hard disk. Creating your master image of the drive There it is! Okay, so now that I know the correct name of the feature, let’s run the command to install it, as shown in the following example: Add-WindowsFeature Telnet-Client With these new and improved ways to manage the underlying components of your servers without having to log in to them directly, does this mean that our age-old friend RDP is going away? Certainly not! We will still have the need to access our servers directly sometimes, even if we go all-in with using the newer management tools. And I also expect that many administrators out there will continue using RDP and full desktop-based access for all management and monitoring of their servers simply because that is what they are more comfortable with, even if newer, more efficient ways now exist to accomplish the same tasks. Remote Desktop Connection Manager This book covers a range of remote access technologies, and even teaches management of PKI and certificates. You will be empowered to virtualize your datacenter with Hyper-V, and deploy your own Remote Desktop Services "farm". Learn about Server Core, built-in redundancy, and explore troubleshooting skills. All this on top of chapters about core infrastructure technologies such as Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, and Group Policy. What you will learn