Windows Server 2008 R2 Unleashed (7 page)

Ricardo Hernandez, Marcus Bradford, Hadi Droubi, Stefan Garaygay, Ray Wan, Raul

Alcaraz, Domenic Pacini, and Roberto Alcantar. Thank you all for your support over the

years.

Ross Mistry, MVP, MCITP

I would like to thank my wife Sherry for doing an excep-

tional job raising our children in my absence. I know it is not easy with my long hours,

clients, conferences, and writing back-to-back books. For this I am very grateful and

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recognize all the hard work and dedication you devote to our children Kyanna and

Kaden.

Many thanks to Rand Morimoto, my fellow coauthors, and the team at Sams Publishing.

It has been great working together on another title.

A special thinks to my children. I am so proud of both of you. Live life to the fullest—

chase happiness and good health, not money.

Finally, to my long-time mentor Rustom Saddiq, thank you for guiding me through. The

time is now…

Chris Amaris, MCSE, MVP, CISSP

Thanks, Rand, for the opportunity to work with

you again on another book. The books keep getting bigger, the chapters longer, and the

technologies more complicated, all of which I’m sure helps keep my brain young. Your

guidance and example is invaluable.

I’d also like to thank Microsoft for developing the sophisticated virtualization technolo-

gies like Hyper-V and Remote Desktop, which make developing and working with the

complicated virtual lab environments for the book incredibly easier.

And, as always, a huge thanks to my children for their hard work and efforts to do well in

school while I’m lost in those virtual labs.

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Introduction

Windows Server 2008 R2 is the latest release of the Windows Server operating system.

Over the years, it has evolved quite dramatically from the early days of Windows NT

Server, Windows 2000, Windows 2003, or even Windows 2008. With the release of

Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft again has introduced a number of new technologies

intended to help IT professionals improve their ability to provide network services to the

clients they serve.

We’ve had the opportunity to write a book on every version of Windows Server over the

past two decades, and when we set out to write this book, we wanted to once again

provide you, the reader, with a lot of really valuable information. Instead of just market-

ing fluff that talks about features and functions, we wanted to really dig down into the

product and share with you best practices on planning, preparing, implementing, migrat-

ing, and supporting a Windows Server 2008 R2 environment.

Even though the original Windows Server 2008 released in early 2008 and Windows 2008

R2 released late in the summer of 2009, we’ve been fortunate enough to work with these

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operating system releases for more than 2 years in priority early adopter programs. The

thing about being involved with a product so early on is that our first experiences with

these products were without any documentation, Help files that provided guidance, or

any shared experiences from others. We had to learn Windows Server 2008 R2 from expe-

rience, usually the hard way, but that has given us a distinct advantage of knowing the

product forward and backward better than anyone could ever imagine. And we started to

implement Windows Server 2008 R2 in production environments for a select group of our

enterprise customers more than a year before the product release—where organizations

were depending on the server operating system to run key areas of their business.

So the pages of this book are filled with years of experience with Windows Server 2008

and 2008 R2, live production environment best practices, and fully updated with RTM

code specifics that will hopefully help you design, plan, prototype, implement, migrate,

administer, and support your Windows Server 2008 R2 environment!

This book is organized into 11 parts, each part focusing on core Windows Server 2008 R2

areas, with several chapters making up each part. The parts of the book are as follows:

.
Part I: Windows Server 2008 R2 Overview—
This part provides an introduction

to Windows Server 2008 R2 not only to give a general technology overview, but also

to note what is truly new in Windows Server 2008 R2 that made it compelling

enough for organizations to implement the technology in beta in production envi-

ronments. We also cover basic planning, prototype testing, and migration tech-

niques, as well as provide a full chapter on the installation of Windows Server 2008

R2 as well as the GUI-less Windows Server Core.

2

Windows Server 2008 R2 Unleashed

.
Part II: Windows Server 2008 R2 Active Directory—
This part covers Active

Directory planning and design. If you have already designed and implemented your

Active Directory, you will likely not read through this section of the book in detail.

However, you might want to look through the Notes and Tips throughout the

chapter, and the best practices at the end of each chapter because we highlight some

of the tips and tricks new to Windows Server 2008 R2 that are different from

Windows 2000, 2003, and 2008. You might find that limitations or restrictions you

faced when designing and implementing Active Directory 2003 and 2008 have now

been revised. Topics such as federated forests, lightweight directory services, and

identity lifecycle management capabilities might be of interest.

.
Part III: Networking Services—
This part covers DNS, DHCP, domain controllers,

IPv6, and IIS from the perspective of planning, integrating, migrating, and coexist-

ing. Again, just like in Part II, you might find the Notes, Tips, and best practices to

have valuable information on features that are new in Windows Server 2008 R2; you

might find yourself perusing these chapters to understand what’s new and different

that you can leverage after a migration to Windows Server 2008 R2.

.
Part IV: Security—
Security is on everyone’s mind these days, so it was a major

enhancement to Windows Server 2008 R2. We actually dedicated three chapters of

the book to security, breaking the information into server-level security such as

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Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) certificate services; transport-level security such as

IPSec and NAT traversal; and security policies, Network Access Protection (NAP), and

Network Policy Server (NPS) that have been updated in Windows Server 2008 R2.

.
Part V: Migrating to Windows Server 2008 R2—
This part is dedicated to the

migrations from Windows 2003 and 2008 to Windows Server 2008 R2. We provide a

chapter specifically on tips, tricks, best practices, and lessons learned on the plan-

ning and migration process to Windows Server 2008 R2. We also have a chapter on

application-compatibility testing of applications currently running on earlier

versions of Windows Server and how to test and migrate applications to a Windows

Server 2008 R2 platform.

.
Part VI: Windows Server 2008 R2 Administration and Management—
After

you get Windows Server 2008 R2 in place, you end up spending the rest of your time

managing and administering the new operating system platform, so we’ve dedicated

six chapters to administration and management. This section covers the administra-

tion and management of users, sites, organizational units, domains, and forests

typical of a Windows Server 2008 R2 environment. Although you can continue to

perform tasks the way you did in Windows 2000, 2003, and 2008, because of signifi-

cant changes in replication, background transaction processing, secured communica-

tions, Group Policy management, and Windows PowerShell management tools,

there are better ways to work with Windows Server 2008 R2. These chapters drill

down into specialty areas helpful to administrators of varying levels of responsibility.

This part of the book also has a chapter on managing Windows Server 2008 R2 using

System Center Operations Manager 2007.

Introduction

3

.
Part VII: Remote and Mobile Technologies—
Mobility is a key improvement in

Windows Server 2008 R2, so this part focuses on enhancements made to Routing

and Remote Access Service (RRAS), significant improvements in Remote Desktop

Services (formerly Terminal Services), and the introduction of a new remote access

technology called DirectAccess. Instead of just providing a remote node connection,

Windows Server 2008 R2 provides true end-to-end secured anytime/anywhere access

functionality. The chapters in this part highlight best practices on implementing and

leveraging these technologies.

.
Part VIII: Desktop Administration—
Another major enhancement in Windows

Server 2008 R2 is the variety of new tools provided to support better desktop admin-

istration, so this part is focused on desktop administration. The chapters in this part

go in depth on client-specific group policies, the Group Policy Management

Console, Active Directory Administrative Center, Windows PowerShell-based group

policies, Windows Deployment Services (WDS), and desktop administration tools in

Windows Server 2008 R2.

.
Part IX: Fault-Tolerance Technologies—
As networks have become the backbone

for information and communications, Windows Server 2008 R2 needed to be reliable

and more manageable, and sure enough, Microsoft included several new enhance-

ments in fault-tolerant technologies. The four chapters in this part address file

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system management and file-level fault tolerance in Distributed File System (DFS),

clustering, Network Load Balancing, and backup and restore procedures. When these

new technologies are implemented in a networking environment, an organization

can truly achieve enterprise-level reliability and recoverability.

.
Part X: Optimizing, Tuning, Debugging, and Problem Solving—
This part of

the book covers performance optimization, capacity analysis, logging, and debug-

ging to help optimize and solve problems in a Windows Server 2008 R2 networking

environment.

.
Part XI: Integrated Windows Application Services—
The last part of this book

covers core application services integrated in Windows Server 2008 R2, including

updates to Windows SharePoint Services and the Windows Media Services compo-

nent.

It is our hope that the real-world experience we have had in working with Windows Server

2008 R2 and our commitment to relaying to you information that will be valuable in your

planning, implementation, and migration to a Windows Server 2008 R2 environment will

help you get up to speed on the latest in the Windows Server operating system software!

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CHAPTER 1

IN THIS CHAPTER

Windows Server 2008 R2
. Windows Server 2008 R2

Defined

Technology Primer
. When Is the Right Time to

Migrate?

. Versions of Windows Server

2008 R2

. What’s New and What’s the

Same About Windows Server

Windows Server 2008 R2 became available in the

2008 R2?

summer of 2009. In many ways, it is just the next-genera-

tion server operating system update to Windows Server

. Changes in Active Directory

2008, but in other ways, it is more than just a service pack

. Windows Server 2008 R2

type update with significant feature enhancements intro-

Benefits for Administration

duced in the version release. To the authors of this book, we

see the similarities that Windows Server 2008 R2 has in

. Improvements in Security in

Windows Server 2008 R2

terms of usability and common graphical user interfaces

(GUIs) with previous versions of Windows Server that make

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. Improvements in Mobile

it easy to jump in and start implementing the new tech-