Microsoft 70-740 - Install, Storage & Compute w/ Server 2016

Explore the capabilities of Windows Server 2016, including editions, roles and features, Hyper-V with containers, Storage Spaces, and PowerShell 5 for automation and remote management.

Choose the right Windows Server edition to fit your organization's needs and licensing costs, comparing Essentials, Standard, and Data Center for virtualization and storage roles.

Plan hardware for Windows Server 2016 based on service load. Evaluate memory and disk needs by roles such as domain controller, DNS, DHCP, SQL Server, using server core as default.

Master Windows PowerShell as a command line and scripting language for system administration, enabling automation and remote management across single or multiple machines.

Learn the basics of Windows PowerShell for managing Windows Server and client systems, covering syntax, cmdlets, tab completion, help, and remoting.

Explore what's new in Windows Server 2016, including nano server, Hyper-V containers, Docker support, rolling upgrades, nested virtualization, shielded virtual machines, and storage spaces direct with storage replica.

Explore the installation process for Windows Server 2016 core and nano editions, following the overview of new features and roles in 2016.

Plan a Windows Server 2016 installation by assessing hardware suitability and selecting desktop experience, server core, or nano server, with server core as default and nano server for virtualization.

Learn how nano server in Windows Server 2016 offers a smaller footprint. It uses remote management tools, supports only 64-bit apps, and provides faster setup with fewer post-install updates.

Install nano server roles using compute and packages parameters with PowerShell, enabling Hyper-V, clustering, file server, DNS, and IIS, while noting ad ds, ad cs, and DHCP are not supported.

Copy the nano server image generator, import its module in an elevated PowerShell session, and create a VHD or Wim with media path, target path, computer name, and packages.

Configure nano server via the recovery console by setting computer name, domain join, networking, time zone, and firewall rules; join the domain with the D join utility and manage remotely.

Configure nano server, join it to the test labs domain with offline domain join using djoin, and enable remote management and firewall rules while installing file server role with PowerShell.

Learn how to decide between in-place upgrades and migrations on Windows Server 2016, including preserving files and apps during upgrades and migrating roles to new hardware or cross-platform moves.

Activate Windows Server 2016 immediately after installation to enable customization and updates, with no grace period; licensing is by processor core, with two-core licenses and manual or automatic activation.

Explore activation models in Server 2016, including KMS hosts, volume activation services, and AD-based activation. Learn how MAK, VMT, proxy activation, and automatic VM activation fit licensing needs.

Discover how Windows Server 2016 enables automated, file-based imaging with Windows Deployment Services, the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, and the WDM image file format, including VHD deployment with native boot.

Learn to configure images for Windows Deployment Services, distinguishing thin, thick, and hybrid images, and using boot and install images to deploy the operating system and applications.

Explore image-based installation tools for deploying Windows Server 2016, including setup.exe, unattended.xml, the catalog, Windows SIM Utility, and DSM for managing WIM files and Windows PE.

Create and customize install images for image-based deployment using a reference computer, generalize with sysprep, capture via pixie boot, and deploy through Windows deployment services to multiple target machines.

Learn to manage disks and volumes in Windows Server 2016, including disk types and file system choices, a foundational topic that remains essential across versions.

Compare MBR and GPT partition styles for Windows servers, noting MBR's four primary partitions and 2 terabytes, extended partitions and logical drives, and GPT's 128 partitions with 18 exabytes.

Explore ReFS, resilient file system that overcomes NTFS limits with metadata integrity, checksums, and fault-tolerance for large volumes, Hyper-V VHD/VHDX, storage spaces direct, and archive data, while maintaining NTFS compatibility.

Access drives on Windows Server 2016 by bringing disks online, initializing with MBR or GPT, and creating NTFS or ReFS volumes; compare drive letters and mount points via disk management.

Master graphical disk management and PowerShell to create, mount, initialize, get VHD information, format, and modify virtual hard disks, and convert VHD to VHD format.

Explore dynamic disk volume types, including simple, span, striped, mirrored, and raid 5 with parity, and understand their fault tolerance and how storage spaces compare as a software option.

Explore managing volumes in Windows Server 2016 using Server Manager, Disk Management, DiskPart, and PowerShell to create, extend, delete volumes and assign drive letters on basic and dynamic disks.

Discover raid concepts, including mirroring and parity, and understand how redundant discs provide fault tolerance and potential performance, while distinguishing high availability from disaster recovery.

Explain hardware versus software raid: hardware uses a controller and external config; software raid is configured in the OS. Provide hardware raid performance and boot advantages; software raid limits levels.

Explore storage spaces, a feature introduced in Windows Server 2012 and enhanced in 2016, offering flexible storage for direct attached storage as an alternative to storage area networks.

Discover how storage spaces deliver scalable, reliable, inexpensive local storage by pooling diverse disks into a single storage pool, enabling tiering, hot spares, automatic repair, and failover clusters.

Manage and maintain storage spaces with server manager and Windows PowerShell, creating storage pools and virtual disks; use cluster features like failover clustering and cluster shared volumes for high availability.

Learn to manage storage spaces with Windows PowerShell by listing storage pools and virtual disks. Repair virtual disks, filter unhealthy physical disks, remove disks from pools, and optimize volumes.

Explore how data deduplication in Windows Server 2016 identifies and removes data duplication to store more data on less storage while maintaining integrity through variable sized chunking and compression.

Install the data deduplication role via PowerShell or Server Manager; not supported on system or boot volumes; volumes must be NTFS or ReFS on MBR or GPT and not removable.

Explore direct attached storage, network attached storage, and storage area networks learn how servers access disks. DAS suits small to medium environments, while NAS and SAN offer flexibility and scalability.

Explore network attached storage (nas) that provides file-level access via cifs/smb and runs on a dedicated operating system. Weigh its advantages—centralized, inexpensive storage—against slower access and sql/exchange incompatibility.

Compare block storage and file storage and how DAS, NAS, and SAN influence deployment. Assess application support and cost to decide when to use block vs file storage.

Learn Fibre Channel, a high-performance network technology that connects servers to storage area networks, with SAN, HBA initiator, and switches, plus Fibre Channel over Ethernet and its simpler management.

Explore Fibre Channel layouts: arbitrated loop, point-to-point, and switched fabric, highlighting how hosts and storage connect with or without switches and why switched fabric is most common today.

Enable the iSCSI target server to provide block storage for apps like Exchange and SQL on Windows Server 2016, supports up to 256 targets via Server Manager or PowerShell.

Explore three advanced storage features for enterprise networks—iSNS, data center bridging (DCB), and MPIO—designed to simplify storage management in large organizations.

Learn how multipath I/O uses multiple physical paths between servers and storage to boost availability and performance through load balancing, with support for up to 32 paths in Windows Server.

Configure file and folder sharing in Windows Server 2016 to make data available over the network. Explore storage technologies, protocols, and enhancements that improve sharing capabilities.

Configure file sharing as a core network service in Windows Server 2016, enabling default folder sharing; highlight server message block updates, file server resource manager, and scale-out file server clusters.

Explore the evolution of server message block from SMB1 to SMB 3.11, including pre-authentication integrity and 128-bit encryption for secure sessions and rolling upgrades with cluster dialect fencing.

Windows Server 2016 storage capabilities include storage spaces, data deduplication, disk management, and configuring SMB and NFS shares across DAS, NAS, and SAN with multipath I/O.

Review key concepts from chapter 02 of the Microsoft 70-740 install, storage, and compute with Server 2016 course, reinforcing exam readiness.

Define Hyper-V and explore its new features, then install the Hyper-V server role in Windows Server 2016.

Explore Hyper-V, the hardware virtualization platform in Windows Server 2016 that partitions hardware to run multiple independent virtual machines, each with its own operating system.

Explore new host features in Windows Server 2016, including host resource protection, Hyper-V Manager improvements, nested virtualization, rolling cluster upgrades, shielded VMs, start order priority, storage QoS, and PowerShell Direct.

Demonstrates installing the Hyper-V role on Windows 10 and within a VM, using a GitHub script to enable nested virtualization, configure memory, and verify the install.

Configure storage and networking on Hyper-V hosts to optimize performance and efficiency for Hyper-V guest operating systems, prior to virtual machine deployment.

Use virtual hard disks (VHD) to store Hyper-V VM data as single files that appear as normal disks inside the guest. Create VHDs via Hyper-V manager and Disk Management.

Compare virtual hard disk formats: VHD and the newer VHDs, including the 64 TB limit and failover clustering use. Learn cross-format conversion and the space required to copy data.

choose vhd for virtual hard disks, unless backward compatibility with older systems is needed; use dynamically expanding disks and avoid differencing disks by keeping the parent disk read-only.

Hyper-V on Windows Server 2016 enables virtual Fibre Channel adapters to access storage via port virtualization, up to four adapters per VM.

Demonstrates managing Hyper-V storage with Hyper-V manager and Windows PowerShell, creating and configuring virtual hard disks (VHD/VHDX) with fixed, dynamically expanding, and differencing options, and bringing volumes online.

Explore Windows Server 2016 networking enhancements for Hyper-V, including software defined networking with QoS, VMQ improvements, RDMA/SMB Direct, switch embedded teaming, and NAT virtual switch creation.

Configure storage and networking before creating virtual machines on the Hyper-V host. Move VMs from older systems to server 2016 and understand VM configuration versions, updates, and generations.

Learn to create and configure virtual machines in hyper-v using gui and powershell, including naming, storage location, generation, startup memory, dynamic or static memory, network adapters, and virtual hard disks.

Create and manage standard and production checkpoints for Windows Server 2016 virtual machines, using Avd differencing data and volume shadow copy service for offline, restorable snapshots, not backups.

Learn how to import and export virtual machines in Hyper-V, transfer between hosts, and create backups, with options to register in place, restore, copy, export checkpoints, and perform live migration.

Enable remoting to the Hyper-V host via the VM name to run PowerShell commands with Windows PowerShell Direct. Require admin access and winrm authentication to connect to the virtual machines.

Understand Windows Server and Hyper-V containers, including how containers provide a physically isolated environment for apps, host multiple containers on one server, and how two container types differ.

Identify Windows container host requirements on Windows Server 2016 or newer, including Hyper-V and Hyper-V containers, with nested virtualization, 4 GB memory, 2 virtual processors, and Intel VT-X.

Deploy a contained host to run Windows Server containers, choosing nano server or full server, configure a virtual switch and NAT as needed, and install container OS images via PowerShell.

Explore Windows Server 2016's native Docker daemon for Windows hosts, how containers run on Windows, and Linux containers require a Linux host, with management via Docker set or Windows PowerShell.

Explore the Docker toolbox, a collection of tools for building, testing, deploying, and running containers, including Docker engine, compose, machine, kitematic, registry, and swarm, with cross-platform installation.

Explore Windows server containers and Hyper-V containers as lightweight virtualization that virtualizes the operating system kernel and user mode. Learn deployment with Windows PowerShell and Docker on Windows Server 2016.

Review chapter 04 of the Microsoft 70-740 course, focusing on install, storage, and compute concepts in Server 2016.

Develop business continuity plans by defining SLAs, backup contacts, and an alternate site; assess risk and identify critical applications to shape backup, restore, replication, and high availability strategies.

Explore business continuity strategies for server 2016, including virtual machine backups, high availability options for back-end apps via failover clustering, and front-end load balancing with on-prem or cloud backups.

Develop disaster recovery plans that document recovery procedures, assess risk, specify what data to recover and where, outline when to recover, and emphasize regular testing to keep the plan dynamic.

Understand service level agreements as contracts that define responsibilities, availability, hours of operation, recovery point objectives, recovery time objectives, retention, and performance for internal and external services.

Plan high availability in networking for continuity. Eliminate single points of failure across adapters, multipath i/o, local area networks, wide area networks, and internet connectivity with redundancy and load balancing.

In server 2016, plan for Hyper-V replica by enabling flexible replication frequency (30s–15m), supporting extended replication to a third host, and using Azure as a replica repository to boost redundancy.

Verify hardware support, ensure sufficient storage on both servers, establish network connectivity, and open firewall ports for Hyper-V replica, then enable replication and start initial replication.

Explore failover clustering terminology, including nodes, services, clustered resources, shared storage, quorum and witness, and the concepts of failover, failback, and clients.

NLB distributes traffic across 2–32 cluster nodes to provide scalable high availability for stateless web tiers, prioritizes servers, and fails over when a node goes offline.

Understand how NLB uses a virtual IP cluster address to route traffic to a single node, guided by port rules, affinity, and five consecutive heartbeats triggering convergence, with manual node adjustments.

Explore network load balancing options in Server 2016, including port rules, filtering modes, and affinity settings, and see how multiple or single host and affinity affect stateless and stateful traffic.

Design the network to support NLB by choosing cluster operation mode; use unicast for multi-adapter clusters and multicast for single-adapter setups; note MAC addresses and IGMP and switch requirements.

Plan and configure failover clustering to support stateful back end applications in Windows Server 2016, distinguishing it from front end stateless network load balancing.

Explore application considerations for failover clustering of stateful workloads, including shared storage for a single data set and capacity planning for IPv4/IPv6 and multi-node clusters with SQL Server and Exchange.

Ensure shared storage uses basic disks with failover clusters, avoiding dynamic disks. Format partitions with NTFS or ReFS, except scale-out file servers; use SCSI commands and multipath I/O for redundancy.

Plan hardware to meet availability and support requirements, with domain controllers on 2008+. Keep all cluster nodes on the same Windows Server 2016 edition and align domain forest functional levels.

Install failover clustering feature on all cluster members using server manager or PowerShell, then validate and create the cluster; use failover cluster management tools to configure roles and test failover.

Explore how to create a failover cluster by configuring iSCSI storage, establishing iSCSI targets and initiators, and using PowerShell and the failover cluster manager to validate and form a cluster.

Install the failover clustering feature on cluster nodes, then deploy the clustered role via cluster manager or PowerShell; DFS namespaces, DHCP, and file server require the file server role.

Manage failover clusters by adding or evicting nodes, draining for maintenance, applying cluster-aware updates, configuring networks, and adjusting permissions and quorum settings or migrating services via the console or PowerShell.

Manage failover cluster properties and node operations using failover cluster manager or PowerShell. Configure general properties, resource types, VM load balancing, and delegated cluster permissions.

Understand storage configuration for failover clustering across cluster roles in cluster manager. Learn to create storage pools, add disks to CSVs, and bring disks online or offline for maintenance.

Establish proactive monitoring and backup procedures for a failover cluster, and leverage Windows Server 2016 core or cluster-aware updating to update nodes without downtime.

Monitor failover clusters with event viewer, performance and reliability monitors to review logs and metrics; use failover cluster manager, event trace logs, traceRPT, and configuration reports.

Learn to troubleshoot a failover cluster using standard methods, validate configurations with the wizard, review events and logs, identify issues, prioritize causes, implement fixes, and test repairs one by one.

Explore cluster communication and node health via network heartbeats, and compare aggressive and relaxed monitoring, tuning delay and threshold for same subnet, cross subnet, and cross site multi-site clusters.

Explore high availability options for virtualized environments, focusing on host clustering where virtual machines are failover resources, with guest clustering, nlb in vms, and fibre channel or iscsi storage.

Learn how host clustering configures virtual machines as highly available resources in a failover cluster, enabling failover to another node via heartbeat signals, planned switchover, live migration, and optional failback.

Enable cluster shared volumes in Windows Server 2016 to let multiple nodes read-write the same ntfs volume, enabling faster failover without ownership changes and reduced luns.

Explore storage replica, a storage agnostic replication between clusters or servers, offering synchronous and asynchronous replication. It supports stretch clusters, server-to-server, and cluster-to-cluster configurations for disaster prevention and recovery.

Install and configure WSUS on Windows Server 2016 using Server Manager or PowerShell, then tailor update sources, languages, classifications, and group policy to point clients to the intranet update service.

Learn to author and deploy DSC configurations in your organization by configuring WinRM, setting up the LCM agent with push or pull modes, and deploying modules and configurations with start-dscconfiguration.

Explore Windows Server 2016 monitoring tools and how they ensure ongoing efficiency of the server operating system and network infrastructure, with usage scenarios and notes on third-party monitoring.

Explore task manager in Windows Server 2016, including processes and performance views. Track CPU and memory, sort by usage, and end unresponsive tasks.

Use performance monitor to view real-time and historical data via performance objects and counters, including CPU, memory, disk, and network. Employ data collector sets for scheduled, proactive monitoring and reports.

Explore resource monitor to filter applications and monitor network, cpu, memory, and disk utilization with current and recent data, and relate reliability monitor trends to crashes and patch compatibility.

Explore event viewer in server manager for monitoring and troubleshooting, viewing Windows logs (application, security, system) with error details and event IDs; create custom views and use PowerShell for logs.

Explore how server manager focuses on monitoring, showing role status and services across local and remote servers, with analyzers and a central dashboard for health checks.