Chapter 3. Core Infrastructure Services

Each of you reading this book is going to have a different acquired skillset and level of experience with the Windows Server environment. As I mentioned previously, being able to make servers run the operating system is great and a very important first step to doing real work in your environment, but until you know and understand what the purposes are behind the main roles available to run on Windows Server 2016, the only thing your new server is doing is consuming electricity.

A server is intended to serve data. The kinds of data that it serves and to what purpose depend entirely on what roles you determine the server must, well, serve. Appropriately, you must install roles within Windows Server 2016 to make it do something. We already know how to get roles installed onto our server, but have not talked about any of the purpose behind these roles. In this chapter, we will take a look at the core infrastructural roles available within Windows Server. This involves discussing the role's general purpose, as well as plugging in some particular tasks dealing with those roles that you will be responsible for doing in your daily tasks as a server administrator. We will also cover new functions that are part of those roles which are being introduced with Windows Server 2016 in particular:

• What is a domain controller?
• Using AD DS to organize your network
• The power of Group Policy
• DNS overview
• DHCP versus static addressing
• Backup and restore
• MMC and MSC shortcuts