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.

Compared to that timeline, installing a modern operating system (OS) such as Windows Server 2022 is almost unbelievably fast and simple. However, because I had not installed the role or configured anything domain-related on it, this server was a perfect candidate for displaying the Sysprep process, and so I used it in our text today.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. The management and administration of these servers then become an IT burden, and adopting the centralized administration tools and ideas available within Windows Server 2022 will also save you considerable time and effort in your daily workload. If I wanted to install the web server role onto WEB1, a new server that I am prepping to be a web server, I would not have to log into the WEB1 server. If I run that on my domain controller, you can see all the parts and pieces of my roles for AD DS, DNS, and DHCP, as well as my newly installed Telnet Client feature, as shown in Figure 2. In addition to those normal options, you will also be asked whether you want to upgrade to Windows Server 2022 Standard or the (Desktop Experience) version.

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. Starting with in-place upgrades from Server 2012R2 to Server 2016, it was suddenly possible to be successful with an in-place Windows Server upgrade. But it works nonetheless and is a quick, easy, and free way to prep your bootable USB sticks for fresh operating system installations. Since it was still sporadic, it was not commonly attempted, and we continued to stick to old methods of replacing servers.The answer is yes, but the big problem is that the new image or hard drive that you just created would be an exact replica of the original one. 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. exe command, you will see a graphical interface for Sysprep, where you can choose between the available options, as shown in Figure 2. You might not be able to see the colors in the picture if you are reading a printed copy of this book, but this gives you a very quick view of whether or not the services running on this server are functioning properly.

Now, let’s explore what options are available to us in Server Manager for the centralization of management across multiple servers. Then use the following command to view all of the available roles and features that we can install onto our server. In the next chapter, we will start to dive into some of the most commonly used roles and tools in a Windows Server environment and the core infrastructure technologies surrounding Active Directory. In some previous versions of Windows Server, we had the ability to migrate back and forth from a full Desktop Experience to Server Core and back again, even after the operating system was installed.

This makes sense, except that if you don’t realize the name discrepancy, it can take you a few minutes to figure out why you cannot find what you just installed. But whatever your method, open up Server Manager on your desktop computer, and you will see that it looks and feels just like Server Manager in Windows Server 2022. WAC can also be used to bind your on-premises environment together with your Azure environment through things like Azure File Sync and Azure Backup.