Mastering Windows Server 2022 with Azure Cloud Services: IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS (Series Monographs in Applied Toxicology)

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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 You could have many servers all doing their jobs, and every time a new operating system is released, you simply run the installer and upgrade them. Voila—magic! Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work like that, and I almost never see server administrators willing to take risks in doing an in-place upgrade to an existing production server. It is much more common that we always build brand-new servers alongside the currently running production servers. Once the new server is configured and ready to accept its responsibilities, then, and only then, does the actual workload migrate over to the new server from the old one. In a planned, carefully sculpted migration process, once the migration of duties is finished, then the old server is shut down and taken away. We will discuss this a little bit more near the end of this chapter and try to convince you that in-place upgrades are actually much better than they used to be.

Now, before I go too far down this road of describing the Sysprep process, I will also note that there are more involved technologies available within the Windows infrastructure that allow automated operating system and server rollouts, which can make the new server rollout process even easier than what I am describing here. The problem with some of the automated technologies is that the infrastructure required to make them work properly is more advanced than many folks will have access to if they are just learning the ropes with Windows Server. In other words, having a fully automated server rollout mechanism isn’t very feasible for small environments or test labs, which is where a lot of us live while we are learning about these new technologies.shutdown: This shuts down the system (not a restart) when Sysprep is finished. This is an important one and is one that I typically use. 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.

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’s a new kid in town, and Microsoft expects them to be very popular. Explorations of the tools you’ll need to implement Azure solutions, including Windows Admin Center and PowerShell Design and implement Microsoft Server 2022 in an enterprise environment and use Windows Server to create secure and efficient networks

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Windows Server 2022 continues that trend. Windows Server operating system in-place upgrades are stable and introduce us to a much more efficient way to upgrade servers than the old rip-and-replace methods. Let’s take a minute a prove this. On my Hyper-V host, where I run test labs, I have numerous Server 2022 VMs, but I still have many Server 2019 VMs sitting offline from previous projects. Without a doubt, the most common place that roles and features get installed is right inside the graphical wizards available as soon as your operating system has been installed. By default, a tool called Server Manager launches automatically every time you log in to Windows Server 2022. We will take a closer look at Server Manager itself later in this chapter, but for our purposes here, we will simply use it as a launching platform to get to our wizard, which will guide us through the installation of our first role on this new server we are putting together. 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: Using Sysprep saves you time by not having to walk through the operating system installation process, but it saves you even more time by not having to wait for Windows Update to roll all of the current patches down onto every new system that you create.

audit: This restarts the machine into a special audit mode, where you have the option of adding additional drivers into Windows before the final image gets taken. Disk: Server 2022 requires a PCI Express ( PCIe) storage adapter. ATA/PATA/IDE are not allowed for boot drives. The minimum storage space requirement is 32 GB, but Desktop Experience consumes about 4 GB more space than Server Core, so take that into consideration. 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. 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. Since I always use the same set of options for Sysprep, I find it easier to simply include all of my optional switches right from the command-line input, therefore bypassing the graphical screen altogether. Here is some information on the different switches that are available to use with sysprep.exe:

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. First, just like you have already done, we need to prepare our first server by getting the Windows Server 2022 operating system installed. Refrain from installing any full roles onto the server because, depending on the role and its unique configuration, the Sysprep process that we run shortly could cause problems for individual role configurations. Install the operating system and make sure device drivers are all squared away and you’re ready for the next step. Configuring customizations and updates onto your new server 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: