Server practice exercises

[mrapoc]

Hey all

Getting back into learning servers and best practices. Can someone who considers themselves server literate set me some tasks to crack on with my server self learning regime?

I have a Dell Poweredge 2950. 2 x 15k SAS and 8 x 10k SAS hotswaps. Dual processor 16GB of RAM. Dual PSU.

I can setup RAID already. Install OS fine. I have an MSDN Server 2012 R2 and 2008 I believe to play with. Educational only. I also have the server licensed to 2003 but thats EOL now.

Stuff I have no experience with so far is Active Directory, Raid failure, Group policy, User folder redirection, Server based DNS and DHCP. If anyone can recommend best practices as well as a few practice tasks I can try to crack off my own back (starting from easy/the first thing you would setup on a new server to the final stages/a bit harder).

Visualization is also something I will be playing with but the 2950 doesn't support Hyper-V so may have to look at VMware for playing about with that.

I have a spare machine I can connect to the domain etc.

Cheers

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Recommend doing it a few different ways.....rebuild...rebuild...rebuild.
*Do a bare metal install
*Install Hyper-V...and install guests
*Install VMWare ESXi ..and install guests.

Depending on how large that pair of 15k drives up front is....you can also install a second member server.

Generally with servers, with the RAID, you want to setup a "pair of spindles". A pair of drives in RAID 1 is a spindle. 3x drives in RAID 5 or 4 drives in RAID 10 is a second spindle. A single drive, no RAID, is a spindle. A smaller one up front for the OS (bare metal)..or for hyper-V...install it there..and then you install the guests "C drives" there too. And then on the larger second spindle...you install the data volume of your guests (or the data volume of your bare metal install.

Your 2950 should support Hyper-V....if it's older, a BIOS and BMC firmware upgrade should get VT support there in the BIOS.

This here is a very old article I wrote, screenshots are based on SBS2003. However...the principles still hold true today....MMC for DHCP and DNS are still the same, and how you setup TCP/IP on your server and the network clients are still the same.
http://www.speedguide.net/articles/server-based-network-guide-1660

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Before running "DCPROMO"...I like to have the TCP/IP settings of the server already manually set.
In older versions of Windows Server...DCPROMO was a command you ran to promote a server to be a domain controller. After you installed the DNS role. Now it's run through the Server Console GUI wizard.

Generally for domain name, we still do the .local. Even though things are changing due to how SSL certs are done, I still do it with the public FQDN, but internally I still do .local, such as "server1.mrapoc.local" for the internal FQDN.