What this book covers

Chapter 1, Exam Overview and the Current State of Cloud Workloads, sets you up for success by helping you prepare for a Microsoft exam, helping you to identify additional community resources for training, and establishing a lab and trial Microsoft 365 subscription to reinforce skills with hands-on learning.

Chapter 2, Securing the Windows Server Operating System, covers how to configure and manage settings such as Exploit Protection and SmartScreen, Windows Defender Application Control and Credential Guard, and firewall and antimalware features such as Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. We will also learn how to implement additional system security configurations using Group Policies and configuration baselines.

Chapter 3, Securing a Hybrid Active Directory (AD) Infrastructure, helps you learn how to apply appropriate layers of security to protect Active Directory domain controllers against attack while allowing for continued productivity and secure workloads. You will also learn how to manage protected users, about the delegation of privileges and administrators, how to secure administrative workflows, about the authentication of and to domain controllers, and how to successfully implement and manage Microsoft Defender for Identity.

Chapter 4, Identifying and Remediating Windows Server Security Issues Using Azure Services, helps you learn how to successfully monitor virtual machines running both on-premises and in Azure using Azure Arc, Azure Monitor, and Microsoft Sentinel, allowing for telemetry and metrics insights, analysis, and response. We will also cover how to onboard devices into Microsoft Defender for Cloud so that we can proactively identify and remediate security issues wherever the virtual machine may be running within the infrastructure.

Chapter 5, Secure Windows Server Networking, covers how to configure and manage Windows Defender Firewall, how to successfully plan for and configure domain isolation, and how to implement connection security and authentication request rules for your Windows servers.

Chapter 6, Secure Windows Server Storage, helps you discover how to properly secure Windows Server storage to help protect against data theft, exposure, and ransomware.

Chapter 7, Implementing a Windows Server Failover Cluster, covers how to successfully establish the building blocks for a Windows Server failover cluster, where you will learn how to configure various storage options, and successfully design and configure appropriate network settings for the failover cluster.

Chapter 8, Managing Failover Clustering, covers how to configure components such as cluster-aware updating, how to recover failed cluster nodes, and how to upgrade existing cluster nodes to a newer Windows Server version.

Chapter 9, Implementing and Managing Storage Spaces Direct, covers how to configure Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) and then manage S2D within a failover cluster. We will also discuss how to upgrade the S2D node, as well as implementing proper security and networking configurations for S2D, discovering topics such as converged and hyper-converged deployments.

Chapter 10, Managing Backup and Recovery for Windows Server, discusses managing backup and recovery options for Windows Server. We will cover how to install and use Azure Backup Server for general backup and recovery of files and folders. We will then discuss how to configure and use an Azure Recovery Services vault to manage the backup of files and folders using backup policies.

Chapter 11, Implementing Disaster Recovery Using Azure Site Recovery, covers how to configure Azure Site Recovery, how to create and implement a recovery plan, and how to configure recovery policies to ensure your workload remains online in the event of a planned or unplanned outage/failure.

Chapter 12, Protecting Virtual Machines by Using Hyper-V Replicas, covers how to configure Hyper-V hosts for replication, including the management of the replica servers. We will then discuss how to configure VM replication between replica hosts and ultimately perform a failover to learn about the failover orchestration process.

Chapter 13, Migrating On-Premises Storage to On-Premises Servers or Azure, identifies how to successfully transfer data and share configurations from on-premises Windows servers to other available Windows servers running on-premises or in Microsoft Azure. We will learn how to use Windows Admin Center and Storage Migration Service to migrate services from one server to another.

Chapter 14, Migrating On-Premises Servers to Azure, covers how to deploy and configure the Azure Migrate appliance. Working with the Azure Migrate appliance, we will then migrate VM workloads to Microsoft Azure IaaS, migrate physical workloads to Azure IaaS, and finally, identify additional tools that can be used within Azure Migrate to achieve your migration objectives.

Chapter 15, Migrating Workloads from Previous Versions to Windows Server 2022, covers the available tools for migrating various legacy Windows Server workloads to Windows Server 2022. We will dive into how to migrate Internet Information Services (IIS) workloads, Hyper-V hosts, Remote Desktop Services (RDS) host servers, Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), and print servers from an older Windows Server version to Windows Server 2022.

Chapter 16, Migrating IIS Workloads to Azure, covers the available tools for migrating IIS workloads to Microsoft Azure. We will dive into how to migrate IIS workloads to Azure App Service and Azure Web Apps, and how to migrate IIS workloads to Windows containers by using Dockerfile technology.

Chapter 17, Migrating an Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) Infrastructure to Windows Server 2022 AD DS, helps you learn how to determine the various approaches for moving domain controllers to Windows Server 2022. You will learn how to use the Active Directory Migration Tool to migrate Active Directory objects such as users, groups, and Group Policy objects. You will also learn how to migrate Active Directory objects to a new Active Directory forest.

Chapter 18, Monitoring Windows Server Using Windows Server Tools and Azure Services, covers how to use performance monitoring and data collector sets, how to monitor servers and event logs using Windows Admin Center, and how to monitor overall server health using System Insights.

Chapter 19, Troubleshooting Windows Server On-Premises and Hybrid Networking, covers how to effectively troubleshoot network connectivity for both on-premises and hybrid networking.

Chapter 20, Troubleshooting Windows Server Virtual Machines in Azure, covers how to effectively troubleshoot Windows Server virtual machine workloads in Microsoft Azure. This includes learning how to troubleshoot deployment and booting failures, VM performance and extension issues, disk encryption, storage, and overall VM connection issues.

Chapter 21, Troubleshooting Active Directory, covers how to enable and use the Active Directory Recycle Bin to restore deleted objects, how to use Directory Services Restore Mode to recover a corrupt Active Directory database and/or corrupted objects, and how to recover the SYSVOL folder and files necessary for running Active Directory services.

Chapter 22, Final Assessment and Mock Exam/Questions, is intended for use as additional reinforcement for the objectives reviewed in this guide, giving you a question-and-answer approach to test and validate your knowledge prior to scheduling your exam. There is also a section for lab environment housekeeping to keep your device and Microsoft Azure costs low.