Book Image

Mastering Windows Server 2016

By : Jordan Krause
Book Image

Mastering Windows Server 2016

By: Jordan Krause

Overview of this book

Windows Server 2016 is the server operating system developed by Microsoft as part of the Windows NT family of operating systems, developed concurrently with Windows 10. With Windows Server 2016, Microsoft has gotten us thinking outside of the box for what it means to be a system administration, and comes with some interesting new capabilities. These are exciting times to be or to become a server administrator! This book covers all aspects of administration level tasks and activities required to gain expertise in Microsoft Windows Server 2016. You will begin by getting familiar and comfortable navigating around in the interface. Next, you will learn to install and manage Windows Server 2016 and discover some tips for adapting to the new server management ideology that is all about centralized monitoring and configuration. You will deep dive into core Microsoft infrastructure technologies that the majority of companies are going to run on Server 2016. Core technologies such as Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, Certificate Services, File Services, and more. We will talk about networking in this new operating system, giving you a networking toolset that is useful for everyday troubleshooting and maintenance. Also discussed is the idea of Software Defined Networking. You will later walk through different aspects of certificate administration in Windows Server 2016. Three important and crucial areas to cover in the Remote Access role -- DirectAccess, VPN, and the Web Application Proxy -- are also covered. You will then move into security functions and benefits that are available in Windows Server 2016. Also covered is the brand new and all-important Nano Server! We will incorporate PowerShell as a central platform for performing many of the functions that are discussed in this book, including a chapter dedicated to the new PowerShell 5.0. Additionally, you will learn about the new built-in integration for Docker with this latest release of Windows Server 2016. The book ends with a discussion and information on virtualizing your datacenter with Hyper-V. By the end of this book, you will have all the ammunition required to start planning for and implementing Windows Server 2016.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering Windows Server 2016
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Network Load Balancing


Many times when I hear people discussing redundancy on their servers, the conversation includes many instances of the word "cluster". Such as "If we set up a cluster to provide redundancy for those servers…" or "Our main website is running on a cluster…" While it is great that there is some form of resiliency being used on the systems for which these conversations pertain, it is often the case that clustering is not actually involved anywhere. When we boil down into the particulars of how their systems are configured, we discover that it is Network Load Balancing (NLB) doing this work for them. We will discuss real clustering further along in this chapter, but first I wanted to start with the more common approach to making many services redundant. NLB distributes traffic at the TCP/IP level, meaning that the server operating systems themselves are not completely aware of or relying on each other, but the redundancy is being provided at the network layer itself. This...