Planning for Windows Server installation - Windows Server Tutorial

- [Instructor] When it comes to planning for Windows Server installation, it's important that you know what versions are available and what those versions provide, and what sort of hardware requirements you may have, as far as the hardware resources that are necessary to support the Windows Server version that you're looking to install. So what I want to do here, first of all, if you've watched any of my recent courses, you know that I have tried more and more to move away from a Standard, boring slide presentations where bullets come up on the screen. And I like to take it to the actual URL from Microsoft, where they share this information. And the reason is because things are changing so quickly in today's world, I want to make sure that if this video is suddenly out of date, that you're aware of it. Okay so feel free to copy down the URL that's at the top of the screen. It's an actual document from Microsoft. I got here by literally just going to a search engine and putting in Windows Server 2022 versions. All right, and then you'll notice here we have the editions and the feature comparison. In this article, you'll notice that they'll show you everything that they're currently supporting, at least as of right now, which is Server 2022, 2019, 2016. You can click on any of them to see all the different versions available. But one thing that you're going to find that's going to be very similar with all three of them is they have both a Standard and a Datacenter version. One thing that is different with Server 2022 is that we now have a Datacenter Azure edition, okay? Because everything in the world of Microsoft is pushing in the direction of Azure. But for right now, I want to focus on the Standard and the Datacenter additions. I could go down through this list, and we can look at all the yeses and all the nos. And there's going to be very, very little, again we're not even worried about this third column. We're only looking at these two columns. You'll notice that they're going to be almost completely identical. I believe in this first section, there's one difference here on software-defined networking. You need Datacenter edition for that. Storage Spaces Direct, you need Datacenter edition for that. The one, main difference that you're really going to get with Datacenter versus Standard is when I scroll down here through the locks and the limits, is right down here where it says can be used as virtualization guest. On the Standard edition, you can have two virtual machines plus one Hyper-V host per license. Whereas with Datacenter, you can have unlimited virtual machines plus one Hyper-V host per license. That is one of the absolute main differences that you should know between Standard and Datacenter additions. Okay? So it really has to do with scalability. All right. And same thing. I could keep scrolling all the way down. And you're going to find so few differences between the two versions. They're darn near identical. That is the when looking at the comparisons of whether you want to have Standard or Datacenter edition. Now over on the left, you'll notice there's also an option here for hardware requirements. So I'm going to click on that. It'll take us to that particular article on the hardware requirements for Windows Server 2022. And really, you'll notice it just says Windows Server because it hasn't really changed very much ever since, pretty much all the different versions that they're currently supporting. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to scroll down just to show you that it doesn't actually need a whole lot of power, which is pretty cool, right? As we were growing, if you've been doing this for a while, like I have, you know that in the early days, it was like every new version, you had to go out and get some, the latest and greatest hardware. I mean, you just absolutely had to. Whereas now, it's not nearly as hardware intensive here. So you need a 1.4 gigahertz, 64-bit processor. You need half a gig of RAM. Although, you'll notice it does say you need two gigs if you're going to have the full Desktop Experience. Okay, we'll see the difference between that and the Server Core version of the installation. And as far as how much disc space, 32-gig, okay. Nothing, very, very little. You have to have a network adapter and then other basics. You need a DVD drive if you're going to install it that way. And you need a keyboard, mouse, internet access, things like that. Okay. So those are your requirements. But I do want to emphasize while those may be the actual, minimum hardware requirements, I want to emphasize the word minimum. As in, you don't want to be operating with just the minimum. Now, the reality is, is that even the cheapest of servers that are out there, you're going to have these minimum requirements with no problem. Where these requirements matter is when you are installing in a virtualized environment because you're going to want to have, the physical server you have, that one box, well, you may want to host, let's say a dozen virtual machines that all have Windows Server installed. Well then guess what? Now you've got to take these minimum requirements and you have to multiply them by 12 for each of those 12 machines. And then you probably have to double it on top of that because you don't want the machine to run slow. And then you have to have a little bit extra on top of that because you have the host machine, et cetera, et cetera, you see where I'm going with this. So, as I said, when planning for your Windows Server installation, know what version you want to get and know what the minimum hardware requirements are.