Sara Perrott - Windows Server 2022 & Powershell All-in-One For Dummies

If you want to run Hyper-V Containers or Windows Server Containers, you need to enable this feature. If you want a higher degree of isolation and want to go with Hyper-V containers, you need to enable the Hyper-V role in addition to the Containers feature.

When the containers feature is installed, you have more steps to getting to a working container host like installing Docker and pulling base images. In the Standard edition, you can have unlimited Windows containers, but you can only have two Hyper-V containers. In the Datacenter edition, both Windows containers and Hyper-V containers are unlimited.

Containers are an exciting new technology that was first introduced in Windows Server 2016. For more on containers, check out Book 8.

If your server is going to be used for clustering or for storage, you should consider enabling Data Center Bridging (DCB). DCB allows you to prioritize certain kinds of traffic over others (think of it like a traffic cop). It allows you to utilize your hardware for better bandwidth allocation as well.

Direct Play is a part of the DirectX API and has been deprecated. You must have Desktop Experience enabled to be able to enable the Direct Play feature. You may still run into applications that require the Direct Play API, though, this is unlikely to be found on a server because it was traditionally used for gaming.

Enhanced Storage enables support for additional functions that are available when you use Enhanced Storage–compatible devices. These devices have built-in safety features that can require you to authenticate before you can access the data on the drive. This is very commonly used in USB flash drives.

Failover Clustering is a feature used to provide high availability to server roles. It’s often used for file servers, Hyper-V hosts, and database applications like Microsoft SQL Server. If a server in a failover cluster fails, services can be moved almost seamlessly to another server in the cluster. Systems in a failover cluster are referred to as nodes. Failover clusters take advantage of shared storage so that all nodes have access to the same data. If a failover event occurs, the transition from node to node can be as seamless as possible, because each node has access to the same storage.

For more on high availability with the Failover Clustering feature, check out Book 7, Chapter 5. There, I discuss Failover Clustering in relation to Hyper-V, but the way it works is pretty similar regardless of which application is using it.

Group Policy Management is a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) for managing group policies across your environment. It allows you to create, edit, delete, and assign group policies all the way down to an OU level. It can also be used to enforce a Group Policy Object.

If you want to provision shielded VMs on your Hyper-V hosts, you need to install this feature. It’s available in the Datacenter edition only. This allows the Hyper-V server to communicate with the Host Guardian Service.

Enabling this feature will allow you to set quality of service settings for your applications, including maximum I/O and bandwidth limitations.

The IIS Hostable Web Core feature allows you to write your own custom applications that can host core IIS functionality on their own. Your application will be able to serve HTTP requests and use its own configuration files ( applicationHost.configand web.config) instead of the configuration files used by the traditional full Web Server (IIS) role installation. After the IIS Hostable Web Core is installed, you can open a browser and type http://localhost. This will load the traditional IIS splash screen even though the Web Server role is not installed.

Internet Printing Client allows you to connect to and print to printers on the network or Internet using the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP). It does require that Desktop Experience be installed and, as such, is not available in Server Core.

IP Address Management (IPAM) was a breath of fresh air to network administrators and system administrators who had to manage multiple DNS and DHCP servers. It provides a centralized management pane for both DNS and DHCP and is able to help you locate available IP addresses, available subnets, and so on. Best of all, it supports multiple Active Directory forests, so it really can be a single pane of glass for your organization.

You can read more about IPAM in Book 2, Chapter 6.

Line Printer Remote (LPR) Port Monitor enables your server to print to a printer that is shared using Line Printer Daemon (LPD). This will typically be a Unix or Linux server being used as a print server.

This feature gives you the ability to expose PowerShell cmdlets through an OData-based web service that runs on IIS. OData is a data access protocol that allows you to query and update data. To use this feature, you need to install the Web Server role.

Media Foundation allows you to work with media files. You can transcode. You can analyze media files. You can even generate thumbnail images for media files. It also offers DirectX Video Acceleration and an enhanced video renderer (EVR). Media Foundation supports many of the codecs, sources, and sinks that you would expect, including AVI, DV, H.264, MP3, and MP4.

Message Queueing is often used by applications to deliver messages to other applications. It guarantees message delivery and provides routing, security, and messaging based on priority between applications. Applications are able to send and receive messages from the queues. This is very useful when you need the guarantee that the message will get to its end destination, or when an application may not be able to get the message right away because it's busy or offline. If your application requires Message Queueing, your vendor will list it as one of its requirements.

This feature is installed by default and was previously known as Windows Defender. It’s a built-in next-generation antivirus solution that’s able to look at files and process behaviors for things that appear malicious. It gets regular updates from signatures and through machine learning and threat research.

What happens if your server is connected to its storage through a network switch, and that switch goes down? Your server can’t communicate with its storage any longer. With Multipath I/O, you can allow your server to use multiple paths to your SAN — you could have connections through two separate switches, for instance. If you have connections to two separate switches, your server will still be up and able to access its storage even if one of the switches goes offline. This allows you to build a truly fault-tolerant storage network.

If you’re using Multipoint Services, the Multipoint Connector allows the system to be managed by the Multipoint Manager and the Multipoint Dashboard.

Network Load Balancing (NLB) allows you to spread traffic across multiple servers, which can improve response times because the traffic is evenly distributed. It’s popular with web servers, especially with a stateless application, where the user’s request can be served by a server in the NLB cluster. As load increases, you can simply add more servers to the cluster, and when you need to do maintenance on a particular server, you do so while keeping the other servers in the NLB cluster up. An NLB cluster focuses on reliability and performance, not high availability or fault tolerance.