Read Windows Server 2008 R2 Unleashed Online
Authors: Noel Morimoto
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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any updates, downloads, or errata that might be available for this book.
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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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-