Server Purpose and Function

0:00All right, so what is a server? Some of you might already know what a server is. I think we all do to a certain point, but in this particular skill, in the first skill of this course, I'm gonna kinda go over some of the basics of servers. Some of you have only worked with certain aspects of it, so you might need to have some additional information about various roles that it can take and stuff like that. Also, this image behind me, by the way, if you're not, haven't already guessed, it's not actually a server room. It's a illustration of a server room, and usually they're not curved like this.

0:33That's really not possible. This looks like the server room from the Millennium Falcon or something like that. But anyway, otherwise though, yeah, usually the servers that we talk about are very often in racks like what you see behind me, but not always. And in fact, let's take a look here at what a server actually is. So first of all, just an overview. And again, I wanna emphasize, I'm starting here at more of an entry level. We're very well acquainted with servers already. You've worked with them for maybe a few years or something like that. You could possibly skip this particular skill.

1:05Just look at the contents and see if it suits you. But I'm gonna start at the entry level for someone that has not really had a lot of experience with servers, or very often, as is the case, you might have some administrative experience with servers, but only in one narrow scope or one narrow area, maybe wherever your job aligns to. But you might be largely unaware of, or not educated in some of the other aspects of a server, some of the other roles that it can take and so forth. Okay, so that's where we're gonna be at least starting here.

1:37So what is a server? Well, as the name implies, it centrally serves other devices and resources. So here I've got a server, and it can be doing a lot of different things. It can be resolving names using something like DNS. It can be validating identities of your users, helping them to log on and stuff like that. It could have file shares on it. Okay, stuff like this as well. Various other kinds of services. I'm not gonna elaborate on all those right now. That's part of what the rest of the course is about.

2:08But it provides those resources for our users throughout the rest of the network. And they are usually well-connected. So they're usually wired by Ethernet to the rest of the network. So it would connect into, for example, a switch like we see right here. We don't have Ethernet these days. Anyway, this switch in turn then connects all of these other devices, okay? So this is kind of a juncture, a junction point, if you will, for allowing all of these devices potentially to communicate with one another or to communicate with the server.

2:43One thing that's always also, or most networks nowadays also have, is a Wi-Fi access point, also just known as an AP access point or a WAP or just the Wi-Fi. Anyway, so you've usually got at least one of those as well in most offices, which can then connect your wireless devices. And of course, most PCs as well as, couldn't find my phone for a minute, phones, tablets, all the rest of that, most devices nowadays are Wi-Fi capable. Servers usually are not depending upon the server because their usual expectation there is that they're gonna connect via Ethernet.

3:20You can make them wireless, but it's not generally considered as reliable as a wired connection, even though it's substantially better nowadays than it was in years past. Now, in addition, you may have other networks, okay? You very likely do in an organization of any size, practically, unless it's a very small office, home office with, I don't know, a dozen devices or something like that. Very often there will also be a router here, okay? And the router is very likely connecting two or more switches.

3:53So both of these switches are connected to the router. That way, if this device here needs to communicate with, I don't know, this server here, or one of these other workstations over here, it can transit through its switch through the router, which then connects to this other switch, and then can allow a connection to the remote destination. We're gonna be discussing in more detail a lot of these concepts elsewhere. This is just kind of introducing the whole thing, not gonna try to exhaust it all at once here. Also, the servers are normally always on.

4:25So your laptops, even your workstation, stuff like that, you know, if you go to lunch after a few minutes, 15 minutes or whatever, they'll kind of go to sleep or whatever. They'll snooze. They'll go into sleep mode, is what very commonly it's called. And that's okay, because they're usually designed for a single user. If nobody's there, there's no sense in drawing more power to that device, just let it sleep for a while. Then you come back, you move the mouse, trackball, trackpad, press a key on the keyboard. Of course, we know that it then wakes up.

4:57Well, your servers, you don't normally want that to happen, because yes, if they did go to sleep, you could trigger something to wake them up. There's things called a magic packet, for example, that could be used. Normally users don't have those, but administrators could send a magic packet to wake up a server, or by some other use, it could wake up. But that usually takes a few seconds as well. And servers normally are, you need to keep them in a very timely, high-performing function. So you don't want them to waste, that's supposed to be a clock.

5:28You don't want them to waste even precious seconds becoming available. You want them always on and well-connected. Also, it's not necessary in every situation, but as a general practice, they're usually gonna be high-performing hardware. Why? Because on a workstation, they might only need four gigabytes just to install Windows, and that's of RAM, four gigs of RAM. I don't know, maybe one terabyte hard drive, basic video, that kind of stuff.

5:59Well, that's suitable for a single user that's using that workstation. For a server, I might have dozens or hundreds, but sometimes thousands of users all connected to it at once. That's not gonna be enough. It wildly varies depending upon the workload that you're putting on that server. If it's performing a very simple function, yeah, it might be able to do just fine with only four gigs of RAM, just enough storage to be able to install the operating system and run maybe one service or something like that.

6:31It just depends upon that role. But some servers are very heavily tasked and require terabytes of RAM and possibly terabytes of accessible storage as well. So again, just a generalization, but a lot of times you're gonna need more for a server. I'll be talking more about some of the general hardware that you might see in servers at a later point in the skill. And as I started to allude earlier, they're usually accessible to, in other words, devices can reach these servers from other servers.

7:05So this server, again, maybe through a router or whatever, can probably communicate with this server. Could be for a number of different reasons, for redundancy to make sure that if one server goes down, the other one's still available. We'll talk more about that later as well. It could be that they have an interdependency upon one another. Maybe one server issues certificates, which are digital certificates that this server needs to use or vice versa. Lots of other reasons why it could be needed. Also accessible to your users and devices. Devices have actually got, in a Windows environment, they actually have an account.

7:39So they're kind of considered in a certain way, a user when it comes to something like Active Directory. They still have to actually log on. We never see that happen. That happens before you get to the log on screen for the user, but they also do have to validate that they are who they say they are. Otherwise you can have some, you know, evil hacker dude here with a laptop and he's pretending to be one of your company devices when it's really not, okay? So we have to validate devices as well as users. Also, there could be apps on here.

8:12Now this could be in a number of different forms. Very often these days there are web apps. So there's an app on the server, but the user will access it through a web browser down here. Doesn't have to be that way. Could be a client piece of some kind down there that it installs and uses as well. But regardless, the point I'm making here is there are very often apps up here that the users need to be able to access. In fact, you're using one of those right now as you watch this video.

8:42We have an app that's exposed really as a webpage. Lots of other things you can put up there. Specialized functions might be a human resources app, a Salesforce type of a thing. Lots of other things you could be using up there. And then there's also cloud. So we'll get into this as well later on, but very often nowadays, we're not just in our own local environment here cut off from the rest of the world, you know, or from the rest of the evil internet out here and we're in our own little fiefdom here.

9:13Everything nowadays is internet connected. Very often, very few situations where we do not have an internet connection these days. A big part of that is also gonna be the cloud though, because this server may also interoperate with Azure in some form or another. And it didn't have to be Azure, you know, that's Microsoft's cloud solution. But Azure has a lot of things that these users might use, such as OneDrive. Which is a cloud-based storage solution, so that if I create a document on my Windows computer, and if we're using all Microsoft solutions, and you're gonna be using OneDrive, and that document gets sent almost immediately to OneDrive as a synchronized copy.

9:58So there's actually one copy on my local computer and another copy out there in the cloud on OneDrive. And there's both a personal edition of OneDrive as well as a corporate version. And again, we'll talk more about the cloud and all of that kind of thing a little bit later on. But my server here might be synchronizing something like user accounts that I have here on-premises with kind of a subset, if you will, of Azure called Entra ID. Boy, I'm making a mess of things. Running out of room. Entra ID. So that user account gets kind of duplicated out here into the cloud.

10:31That might allow us to take the same user account, and when the user's not in my local network, to authenticate against a cloud-based resource instead of having to connect to this server, which they might not have access to while they're out there on the internet somewhere. Business trip, airport, whatever. Again, lots more involved in that than what I can just cover in this introductory video. All right, that's a little bit of an introduction to the server world. In the next video, we'll continue the discussion of an overview of Windows Server.

0:01All right, let's continue our discussion of what a server is. And it's really going to start here with a continued overview of common operating systems on a server. So we're really focused mostly on Windows Server, mostly Server 2025, which at the time of this recording is the most recent version. But most of the ones that are predecessors to that are very similar in the Microsoft ecosystem. But there's also Linux. Now Linux is a little bit of a different animal and we're not going to explore that completely, but I'll show you just an example here if you want to see.

0:32So right here, for example, this is a Linux operating system working inside of a virtual machine. We'll talk more about that a little bit later on, but for right now, just understand that this is a flavor of Linux. There's a lot of different flavors out there. You might've heard of a lot of different ones. Red Hat, Ubuntu, those are very common. This one's Linux Mint, which is just my preference. Don't really have a justification for it. I just like it. Anyway, this really is installed at the current time as more or less a desktop operating system.

1:05So I could use this a lot like I would use Windows 10 or Windows 11. However, you can take a Linux desktop operating system and very often add services that kind of make it a server, if you will. So I could make this a file server, for example, and allow other resources to access the files on this computer. I don't really intend to show you a lot here. I just want to show you that this is a possibility as well. You could make it. Now, one operating system that would be more geared towards real server-ish kind of functions would probably be something else like Rail, which would be Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

1:44It's usually a little bit beefier in terms of server capabilities, but I could make this Linux Mint machine a server as well. Now here is probably what we're more likely to see in this particular course, because we're focused here on Windows Server 2025. There are various different editions of that. Mine is a Dent Data Center edition, and you can get this too if you want. This is a trial version or an evaluation version, and I've still got, I guess, 149 days according to what I see there.

2:16So initially, this will look a lot like Windows 11, right? In fact, apart from looking in the lower right corner there, you might not even know that you're on a server. It still has a start menu. It still has a lot of the stuff here, but it does not have all of the same things that a Windows 11 computer, for example, would have. For example, there's not gonna be Solitaire or other games on here, okay? Servers are much more serious than that. I have used a server as a desktop computer just because I'm kind of a geek, but otherwise, normally you don't use it for that.

2:49In fact, most servers can be installed without any kind of a UI like what you see here. There's no start menu, no desktop, none of that kind of stuff. And that's just to make them as slim and lightweight as possible. So they're very often installed without any desktop UI. Very often that's called a Windows Core server, a core installation. And all it's really gonna very often have is some kind of a terminal that you can administer it with. I'll talk more about that coming up here a little bit. So they're not usually there for personal entertainment or feely feels, okay?

3:25We don't really care what the wallpaper is if there even is any. And very often they're also unmanned. So a lot of servers that you'll administer, you might not even know exactly where it's located. So if it's in this rack here, you don't even know if the server you're administering is this server here or this one here or that one there, or if it's even in this rack at all. It might be on the other side of the data center somewhere. And it might even be in a different city. If you expand this out into the cloud where we also have Server 20, 25 servers or other versions as well, you might not even know which building it's in.

4:02In other words, which data center it's in. So for example, a lot of times I will administer Server 20, 25 servers in West US 3, which is an Azure area, a region. Those data centers are over that direction from where I live. I don't know, 20 or 30 miles away. I used to have a relative that worked there. I will never walk up to that server rack and be able to say that's my server and physically look at it, physically touch that server, anything like that.

4:32It's all gonna be done remotely. And in a way, it doesn't really matter if I can put hands on. Now, for an old time administrator like me, I've been doing this since, gosh, when? I guess the late 80s. So I've been doing this for a while. And in the past, administrators used to be very protective of their servers, both the physical server as well as the services that it offered. And we would say, that's my server. Don't anybody else touch it. We'd know exactly where it was located, very protective of it. But nowadays, I don't even know where my servers are.

5:04The desktop server that I showed you a moment ago, I know where that one is. That's on my own local machine right here. It's a virtualized machine, virtual machine. But in productivity and production environments, a lot of times you'll never even touch them or see them. And as I said before, they're usually unmanned. Now, for a lot of racks like this, I can't, this guy's in the way, so I can't show you. But there's often a little drawer that will slide out with a tiny little console on it that kind of looks like a laptop. And you can do some administration of the various devices or servers.

5:35Sometimes this is a lot of, got also got a lot of network equipment. It might have switches in there. It might be a router in there somewhere. But you can, a lot of times remote, not remotely, but you can a lot of times administer them from that little tray that slides out that has a little LCD screen on it. If you have access to the data center, many times nowadays we do not. And that's not just a Microsoft thing. That would be true if you have servers in Azure Web Services or AW, excuse me, what's called Amazon Web Services, also known as AWS, a lot of other cloud providers out there.

6:09Or you might have least space in a data center. Here in the Phoenix area where I live, we have lots of data centers over the past couple of years that have just sprung up out of nowhere and they're stealing all of our electricity. Anyway, that's another subject. But the reality is a lot of them are somewhat self-sustaining for the draw of electricity that they need. But anyway, you can lease space in a data center as well. In those locations, you could walk in there, install a rack, slide in a server, and then remotely administer it.

6:44You're probably not likely to visit that server very often though. You're probably gonna do it from your cubicle, possibly miles away. And that's why we can do that is because the fact that they can be remotely administered. So you can open up a terminal, for example. This is just a text-based UI. I'll show you an example. I don't have anything to connect to right now. So I might open up something like this and I could have PowerShell, which can make a remote connection, or I can connect to a normal Windows command prompt or Azure Cloud Shell, or I could use other products.

7:18And again, my goal is not to teach you all of the nuts and bolts of this right now, but I could do other things such as starting a new session. And very often we'll do that through SSH, which stands for Secure Shell. This encrypts and protects that communication that you have between your own local cubicle or wherever you are, your laptop or something, and that remote server over the internet usually. Doesn't have to be the internet. It could be a dedicated connection, but very often it's over the internet. Well, we don't want someone intercepting that and being able to decipher our communication between those.

7:51You can also do it using Remote Desktop Protocol, or RDP, or VNC. Both of these are solutions that allow you to see the desktop remotely. So it looks and feels as if you're actually on that server right there, but you don't have to be because it could be miles away, even thousands of miles away, and yet you can remotely administer it. And in a way, it kind of doesn't really matter that you can't reach out and touch that server physically. You can also do it by an MMC console. This is a Microsoft Management Console.

8:21Again, we'll get into a lot of this stuff later on. I can't exhaust it all right now, but this is a console that Microsoft built that you can connect to a remote machine in a different location, for example. Or it doesn't have to be a local location. It could be in your own building, but it could be just about anywhere that is reachable over a network. Or you could use a web app. Microsoft has really good solutions right now, such as over here on this, going back to the server right now, you can, there's also something included there already. If I go to the Start menu here, there's this thing down here called Windows Admin Center.

8:53That's kind of the direction that Microsoft's trying to get everybody to go in right now because it's a great way to make remote connections to your servers. And they did a pretty good job with that. And that's really essentially a web-based connectivity mechanism. And again, we'll talk more about some of these things as we go. Increasingly, our servers are in data centers, as I was mentioning earlier, and or in the cloud and not local. Used to be, you know, if you worked for a medium to larger organization, maybe tens of thousands, even a hundred thousand users, for example, you probably had your own data center.

9:28Might've been a dedicated floor or two or more that was in your building or near your building. You might have to skateboard over there or shuttle over there, but anyway, it would be your data center. And anything that was in there belonged to your company and you were in charge of it, or you were in charge at least of a portion of it. Very often, that's not the case anymore. First of all, that's massively expensive to build your own data center. Cost prohibitive in most situations now. So unless you already had one, or there was a business reason, justification, for it to have your own, usually we outsource that now.

10:03And usually we will lease space in a data center. You can roll in your own rack. A lot of times they come on wheels. It's just a rack kind of similar to what you see over here. And you can slide in racks of servers and storage and probably a backup power, maybe some networking equipment, all that stuff. Well, that would be yours to manage because you're leasing that space. And the company that you're leasing it from, they supply everything else. They supply the utilities, the electricity, for example.

10:34They're going to keep it a certain temperature so it's nice and cold in there. Usually they're very cool in there. I usually have to wear a beanie. They're just too cold for my bald head. Or you might just put it in the cloud again, like Azure, as I was mentioning earlier. But anyway, the point is that they are very often not local anymore. And gosh, I haven't put hands on a physical server for quite a while now, because it's always in either a data center or more likely a cloud for me right now. Usually I use Azure. There are very few, if any, applications installed.

11:07So again, it depends upon the purpose of that server. There are a lot of wild variances in this. So we might install an app because that's an app that will then connect to, I don't know, clients, connect to other servers. It's a necessary business reason for it. But we're usually very stingy about what we install on that. Why? Well, among other reasons, you have to have a business reason in the first place. But also the more apps you install, the more things that can go wrong. The more variables that you have to account for in a troubleshooting scenario.

11:39Is it this app that caused the problem? Is it a service that we installed that caused the problem? Did we install an application we don't really need to have for business reasons on this server? Or that app has retired. We don't really use it anymore. We forgot to uninstall it. And it left behind a service that's consuming resources or is potentially a point of attack. I'm getting off track here. I got to get back. So anyway, the point is there are very few, if any, applications that are installed on most of these. A lot of them will already have the services that they need available for you.

12:11And you don't need to install anything else. For example, with Windows Server 2025, it's already got capabilities there for DNS. And I'll explain what these are later on. DHCP, Active Directory, various types of remote desktop setups that we can do. All kinds of things like that, okay? So it's already got all of those things available. You have to kind of flip a switch and turn those on. But it's included in the bits with the operating system. We didn't download some app and then install it separately on a lot of these servers. Again, you can do it if it's justified, but we try to keep that limited as much as possible.

12:44And they usually have a very high uptime. So kind of the gold standard, for example, if you have a server in Azure, Azure guarantees 99.99% uptime. That's four nines. Four nines is what they refer to that as. And that's a good standard, okay? I think AWS also does that, Azure. I keep getting mixed up. Amazon, as well as Azure, does that. Some systems will guarantee 99.999% uptime, which accounts for about five minutes of unplanned downtime per year, okay?

13:22This is gonna be, again, known as five nines, all right? So the point is, whichever one there is, very high uptime availability. It's not like the average desktop user's PC that has to be rebooted because it crashed twice a week or something like that. Also, you're gonna see higher expenses, okay? Of course. These things are expensive. We'll see some hardware examples later on of how high these prices can go. But remember, these are not for personal use.

13:54They may be connecting hundreds or thousands of users all at once. And although, initially, they look very, very expensive, when you average that out or you cost scale that out to hundreds or thousands of users, they're all able to use that server for probably pennies. So per user or per service or whatever, it might actually be very inexpensive. All right, in the next video, we'll be taking a look, what am I looking at next? Server functions, the kinds of things a server is capable of doing for you.

0:00All right, so let's take a look here at some of the things that a server can be useful for. So one of the things you can do is you can install applications on it, right? Remember we said we want to minimize the number of applications that we install on a server, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have any if there's a legitimate business reason for it. What we want to do in many cases is instead of installing individual applications on each user's computer separately, what you can do is to install that application on a server and then just have multiple users connect to it.

0:32These days, past several years, very often they will make that connection through a web, that's not very visible, through a web browser, okay? So the application is surfaced using a web browser and that's how the users can very often access it. And so one of the applications that might be there would be, I don't know if you want to call it an application or a service as much, but on a Windows system, that could be IIS, I-I-S, which is their version of a web server, okay? This might be necessary to use another application that is hosted by IIS and then the user can connect to it over a browser.

1:11Another very frequently used item there would be something like a SQL server, okay? If you're not familiar with SQL, that stands for Structured Query Language, really it revolves around databases. So think about a customer service representative here, onboarding a new customer, for example. Well, she's going to have to have the person's name, maybe their address, phone number, it'll create a customer account number, customer number, all of that stuff. Well, that's going to get put somewhere, right?

1:41Do we want to store it on this user's laptop, which could get lost, stolen, damaged, crash, whatever? No, very often what you're probably going to do is connect again through a web browser, okay? A web browser here, which connects to SQL, which is on this server here. Okay, so SQL and the web browser might be on the same server, sometimes they're split up, that's a whole different strategy. Anyway, those are the kinds of things that we can do. And again, much of that will very often be surfaced through a web server. Another example of that would be, I've owned several businesses before and we still own some.

2:16And for the accounting, what I used to do is I would download accounting software for business. Probably the most common one for small to medium-sized businesses would be QuickBooks, okay? So I would install that, it was on a, back in the day it was on a DVD, and I would install it on my desktop computer actually, or a laptop. And later on, you could download it and then double-click the executable or the MSI file, and then again, install it locally. And then all of my data was also on this local computer.

2:46That's a pretty significant point of failure. Again, laptop gets lost, stolen, hard drive crashes, whatever, I could lose a lot there. Now, of course, there's other backup methods and all that, but barring that, I could lose a lot. In fact, I've got a very good friend of mine, I used to work for him, now he's an employee at Microsoft. But when I worked for him, we had QuickBooks. That was before they put it on the internet the way it is right now. And it was installed on a local server. Well, it was supposed to get backed up on a regular basis. We had an IT person there that was responsible for that.

3:18Turns out she backed it up once and never backed it up again. So when the drive crashed on that server, we lost it all, okay? And my friend spent, he was up several days in a row without any rest trying to recover his business. It was really a nightmare. More for him than for me, but I always felt for him. Anyway, now we don't really have that problem because when I had businesses before, we might install it. Now we have QuickBooks, but it's here in the cloud and it's Intuit, Intuit is the company that owns it.

3:50It's in Intuit's own systems, okay? So they have servers with QuickBooks on them. It's exposed to us through a webpage. And now we just connect to the webpage, which services QuickBooks and we access all of our data. All of my data is stored up here in the cloud. If my laptop crashes, I don't care. Well, I do, I don't want the laptop to crash, but I haven't lost anything in terms of my data. It was never stored on my local computer. Now for safekeeping, if I want to, I could download it to the computer and have all the data there, but I usually didn't even need to.

4:27So that's an example of how that could work. You can also use it for central management, for example, of devices. So on a Windows system, we would, this is changing names a lot of different times, but a lot of times it's called System Center Configuration Manager or just Configuration Manager or just System Center, or sometimes we just call it Config Man. No, that's not right, that's different. Oh, Configuration Manager. So a lot of those different things, but anyway, this is a product that Microsoft makes available to us that you can again, install on a server and it can help manage things like your devices and what they're capable of and all that kind of stuff.

5:04Nowadays, a lot of that for forward moving companies and future thinking companies has now been also been put into Microsoft's Azure Cloud here in something called Intune. And that again, is just another way to centrally manage devices. So I can come up with various rules in Intune or System Center, and I can say, oh, I don't know, you cannot make a connection to our network unless you have these security tests that you've passed, such as having the firewall turned on or something like that.

5:35Central management for your devices, also authentication. So going back to a local on-premises scenario, we would have something like Active Directory or AD. We'll talk more about that in details later on in this course, but that is what we use to store and record our users and our devices. Both have to be authenticated, so they have to be authenticated by Active Directory. And if they are, then it unlocks the desktop or whatever and the user can do their work and the device is available.

6:08That's where their identity is checked. Their username and password, username and password, it's not actually on the desktop or the laptop or whatever, it's actually in Active Directory. And when they enter in those credentials, it checks with Active Directory. There's also security that can be used, gosh, in so many different ways. One of the ways could be, for example, you could use it for, oh, like a checkpoint as a company that does intrusion detection systems and intrusion prevention systems. And so, I know there's a cloud right there, but I'm just going to ignore that.

6:40Let's pretend this is the internet right here. It can come into the server here and there's going to be network equipment involved and stuff like that. Well, it can check for the safety of that data coming in. Can also use it as a firewall, by the way, and it can filter out anything that we might not want to come in. Maybe something from a suspicious IP address or something like that. Or if we're using our intrusion detection system, then it can look for somebody that's out here on the internet. Maybe it's some evil hacker person. All evil hackers have hair, in my opinion.

7:12Anyway, this evil hacker person in trying to get on our network, a lot of times they'll do is repeated attempts at breaking authentication. Well, it can raise an alert to that and stop it. Okay, so that's another security method that could take place there. There's lots of different IDSs and IPSs, okay? That's just a start. There's a lot more than just that. Also for backup and recovery. Remember, we'll have data on here. You might have our SQL database, or if you're into it, you might have your users' QuickBooks files or any other data we have.

7:43It just entered general files, whatever else. Well, very often, those files and all that data is not really stored on the user's laptop or computer. Instead, it's very often stored on the server. So you need to have a backup and recovery mechanism that's tested every now and then to make sure that it can recover data in event of a data loss. Also, can be used for redundancy. So for example, a lot of times in a Windows environment, we'll have something called an active-passive relationship.

8:16So let's just call this, maybe this is our SQL database, okay? Where all of our customers are located and maybe we have online ordering and all that kind of stuff going on, right? So all of our records are stored here on the app. We're using the active server, which in turn is connected to storage in what we call a storage area network. That's usually a fiber-connected network with very, very fast throughput. And so the actual records are usually stored in a SAN, SAN fabric, out of which you can carve storage space for use, okay?

8:51The basic idea there is, in this situation, I don't wanna get into too many details, the data is not usually stored on the actual SQL server. The SQL server will receive that data that we enter in up here, but then it moves it down into our storage and that's where it's kept and available. Now, if this server goes down, there's a heartbeat. See if I can draw a heart. Probably better if it was red, but anyway, that could be interpreted as a heart or something else. Anyway, so then we have this passive server, which as soon as it detects that there's no longer a heartbeat, it immediately becomes active and continues service.

9:28The users might not have any clue that anything's gone wrong, okay? So that's the redundancy. That's clustering, by the way. The other kind of thing you could use there would be geographic. So maybe we are connected to Azure and maybe this is our nearest Azure point of presence, if you will, and everything's working fine until it's not. And then when it's not, we can go off to another Azure resource. The user doesn't have to figure this out, this all can happen automatically. And the resources are still available. Microsoft does a pretty good job synchronizing state information as well as data in between its data centers.

10:05You have to set it up for that, but that's just another possibility. AWS does a similar thing and so forth. Now, I will point out that many functions are moving to the cloud using AWS, using Azure, stuff like that, right? If that's the case, why do we need a course like this? Because even if your organization decided, you know what, we're gonna save some money and you can save a lot of money if you manage it right. We're gonna save money, quit building our own data centers, we're gonna shove everything into Azure, but you can't shove literally everything in there.

10:40Normally, there's still gonna be local servers that you build, manage, service. You can still put hands on them in a lot of places. So you still need to know and know what a server is, know how to manage that server. Plus, even if you aren't using, let's just say you were able to move everything to the cloud, you'll still have servers there. You'll still have Windows Server 20, 25 servers or whatever that you need to manage and administer.

0:00Now, let's take a look here at infrastructure. So when it comes to server roles, if you will, a lot of times we hear the term infrastructure. So an infrastructure server is usually the underlying or backend services that enable network usage, user authentication, devices, applications. It allows all of those things to function. Think about, for example, a house, all right? In your house or your apartment or your RV or whatever you're living in, you have electricity, right?

0:34That's supposed to be a lightning bolt, but anyway, you have electricity. Inside of your house, you have a refrigerator, you have air conditioning, you have a TV, all kinds of stuff, right? Are those three things that I just wrote there, are they electricity? No, but they depend upon electricity. This is the infrastructure. The electricity is the infrastructure that enables all of those devices. Similarly, infrastructure in a server context is what allows something else to happen. Let's take a look at a few examples.

1:05First of all, I've mentioned this before, so I won't dwell on this long, but authentication server, Active Directory, certificate services. So we may get into this a little bit later on, but a certificate is a very important security measure. You're using one right now. You may not have realized it, but when you connect to a secure website like ours, there's a security that authenticates that we are really who we say we are. We're, you know, CBT Nuggets, or in this case, really, Adept is our product that we use to deliver our teaching content.

1:37It also can encrypt the traffic. So if you're using something like Gmail, well, because of Google's certificates, it's able to encrypt your transactions back and forth between your local computer, where you're gonna, say, put together an email and send it, and Gmail itself, okay? So it's gonna be secured that way. Certificates are very useful for that, as well as many other things, code signing, lots of other stuff. Anyway, DNS. DNS is what allows you to go to your website and type in cbtnuggets.com and have it automatically go to our website, right?

2:14What is CBT Nuggets IP address? I don't know. I work here. I've worked here for years. I still don't even know it. I don't have to. Why? Because if I type in the name in my browser, DNS will take the name, and it will look it up, and it will identify the IP address. I'll just make something up here, like 179.25.4.3, something like that. And then what really happens is your browser is gonna connect to this IP address, not the name, even though it shows the name in the browser, okay?

2:45So that's what DNS does for us. DHCP will issue IP addresses to us, or to your devices. So for example, even on a small home office network, like my own right here where I'm working from home today, my phone, if it was turned off and I turned it on, it would connect to my local DHCP server, which in this case is just for my ISP. It's integrated into my Wi-Fi router. Well, it issues an IP address to me. In addition to that IP address, it also identifies which router I'm supposed to use, which I've only got one, but which one I'm supposed to use, whatever else, which DNS servers I'm supposed to use, all that kind of stuff.

3:25So it's your IP configuration is what DHCP is used for. There's also a network policy server. This is very useful for things like other network services, like VPN access, okay? You can't just set up a VPN server and say, all right, whoever wants to connect, you're welcome to connect, not in a corporation anyway. There has to be certain rules in place to allow people to connect or devices to connect under certain conditions. That's what NPS is going to do. Files and data. We've got to put our data somewhere, right? We don't want to just keep it on our local machine.

3:56It's okay to put it there, but anything that's important, a lot of times that's going to be put on an infrastructure server somewhere. So it could be in form of a database. It could be in form of the user's files, whatever else. It's going to store that kind of information. Also, maybe a print server. So you can't just take a USB cable and buy a printer for every single user in every single cubicle, right? So normally what we do is not connect those printers by a USB cable. Normally they're IP connected printers.

4:28They're in some kind of a print room and anybody that prints out a print job, they'll have to get up out of their cubicle, go to wherever the printer is, pick up their print job, return to their cubicle. Well, a lot of times that's handled by a print server. So it can keep the jobs organized. So it can restart a queue if needed. So it can prioritize print jobs, all kinds of things. There's also virtualization. This is what I was showing you earlier. Let me show it to you right here, right? This Windows Server 25 server, that's virtualized.

4:58What I'm actually recording on right now is just a very high powered PC. I could use it as a server. As it is, it would stand out as a really great gaming server. I don't game anymore since my son started beating me at gaming when he was like, I don't know, 17 or 18. Who am I kidding? He was in first grade when he started beating me at gaming. But anyway, it would be a great gaming server or a gaming platform because it's full of hardware of all different kinds. Lots of memory, lots of storage, fast storage, SSDs, all this stuff.

5:30Well, because of its hardware capabilities, it's got a lot of capability there. I can also install, in addition to my Windows 11 operating system, which hosts the entire operating system, I can also install something like VMware Workstation, which is what I'm working with here. That's a product. And inside of that, I can install other operating systems. So this is a Windows server that's on my single computer right now. This is my Linux machine, which is also installed there. I can also, I haven't spun them up, but I've also got a couple of other Windows 11 computers.

6:03And I think I have an Ubuntu computer somewhere. That's virtualization, where we're taking one computer and we're installing multiple operating systems on it. Each operating system thinks that it has its own dedicated computer. It really doesn't. It's sharing it with those other operating systems. There's also other things like WSUS, which is Windows Server Update Services. And this is how updates can get passed out. This is starting to get phased out a little bit. A lot of organizations are still using it, but a lot of that's being transitioned to the cloud now as well, using Azure.

6:35But using something like WSUS, we can schedule when we want our updates to go out to our client computers. That might give us time to test the updates first, set up a staging forum, all that kind of stuff. And remote desktop services. So let's just imagine here that we have, oh, one department that is a very, very low budget. We just refuse to buy them new computers. It worked out great when they were all running Windows 7 years and years ago, but now they're underpowered.

7:08Users are embarrassed to say they even use those computers, but we're too cheap to buy them new ones, right? So what can we do? Well, here is my user's computer here. Maybe there's another one here. There's another user's computer here. They're all low cost computers that cannot support a new installation of Windows 11. What we can do though, is install Windows 11 in a certain form over here, at least, using something called remote desktop services. We can then, and by the way, that's a little oversimplified, but what it does is there are methods you can do to allow each one of these desktop computers, maybe they're all running Windows 7 right now or something, or some other operating system, as long as as a browser, it can also connect to an RDS server over here and deliver a fresh Windows 11 desktop.

7:57Put W11 for Windows 11. I don't know why I put a third one there. These Windows 11 desktops, each one of these computers, they actually have Windows 7 installed, but on the screen, it shows up as Windows 11, and they can operate it here as it's being delivered from this server. So those are a few of the infrastructure roles. There's more, but these are some of the more common ones that you might see out there.