You probably already know about the different
versions of Windows like Home Edition, Pro, and even Enterprise. But there is another
version of Windows for a very different kind of computer, which is called Windows Server.
And while you may have heard of it, I ask you, how much do you really know about it? For me the
answer was basically nothing so I decided to find out, not just by doing some research, but also
by installing it myself and poking around for the most interesting stuff, which I’ll show you. Turns
out there are plenty of tools exclusive to Windows Server that we’ll see, like a Server Manager
which is a major part, as well as for example, an Admin Center to control almost every aspect of the
server through a web interface. So I think you’ll find this interesting, and by the end you’ll have
a much better idea of how Windows Server is used. Of course when it comes to your computer,
there are things way more important than the version of Windows you have, like all those
important pictures and critical documents that all of you have totally backed up right?...
RIGHT? Well not to worry it's not too late, which is where today's sponsor comes in, Crucial.
You probably know Crucial as a long standing leader in RAM and storage manufacturing, in fact I
did put their RAM in my new computer I just built, before they even sponsored this video. Crucial
produces a wide selection of SSD storage drives, including their X6 and X8 external SSDs and P5
Plus, an internal NVMe SSD. And while today is actually World Backup Day, yes
that’s a thing, these drives are good for much more than just backing up.
The X6 for example is really small, but with a big capacity up to 4TB, and speeds up to 800 MB/s.
And the X8 is even faster with up to 1050 MB/s and up to 2TB capacity. Which makes both of these
a great portable way to expand the storage on a laptop for example, which many times have a fast,
but pretty small drive. And even if your computer does have lots of storage, then that's all the
more reason to have this as a backup drive, so you can have the peace of mind that all your
data is both quickly accessible and safe. And since there's no moving parts, it's not even a
big deal if you drop it, unlike a hard drive. Now for super fast internal storage, you've got
the Crucial P5 Plus, an NVMe SSD with the latest PCIe Gen 4 interface and speeds up to 6600 MB/s.
Which for gamers will be even more beneficial now that Windows' DirectStorage API is out, which
will let game developers more fully utilize NVMe speeds when loading graphics for the GPU
- significantly faster than a SATA connection. So whether you want to backup all your important
documents and media, or just have more and faster storage, definitely check out Crucial's SSDs. You
can just check the links down in the description. And with all that being said, let's continue.
Alright first things first, let’s see what it’s like for the installation process of Windows
server. So I’m using an ISO of the latest version, Windows Server 2022, and just putting it on a
virtual machine. You can see there are actually two server editions possible here, the standard
Windows server, and the Datacenter edition which is the more expensive one, so let’s
go with that. The main difference from a regular Windows installation though is here
you can actually choose to install either with a desktop experience, or not, which is the graphic
user interface. So that means you could run the server totally ‘headless’ it’s called, and just
use command line to control it remotely. And interestingly, this is the one it specifically
recommends. But that wouldn’t be very interesting to show, so I’ll choose the GUI. Beyond that the
installation process is the same, and eventually you boot up and have to create a user, and
here’s another difference, which is you can’t choose a username, it has to be Administrator.
Once you boot into Windows, we can check out the more interesting stuff. So the first thing you’d
notice is this “server manager” window pops up, which is basically how you configure everything
on the server and install different services which we’ll go over. As for the interface, it’s
basically the same as the Windows 10 desktop, also with the Windows 10 start menu, not the
Windows 11 one. You can also see there’s zero bloatware obviously, and you can actually see
how little there is in the start menu at all. Another unexpected difference is if you go to shut
down the server, it actually asks you the reason and whether it was planned or not, I guess so it
can be recorded in the log files for reference, since presumably the server shouldn’t be
shutting down or restarting very often. Someone can go look back and see why that happened.
Let’s get back to that server manager though, because it’s a really central part of what
we’ll be seeing. Now to understand what we’re looking at, let me give you some context. You
see, a Windows server, or any server really, can have one or multiple dedicated purposes, which
in Windows Server are called “roles”. So if you’re at a big company, you might have one server
that handles network routing stuff like DNS, another one that handles printing, and another
one for file storage and backup, or whatever else. So one of the first things you would have to do is
install the associated “services” they’re called, for whatever particular roles you want for this
server. And you can see there is an option to “Add Roles and Features” where you do just that.
There are many options, and from my understanding, in most cases each server will be dedicated to
only one or a couple roles, assuming there’s the budget for it. But this video is NOT most cases,
we want to see everything. So I’ll just enable them all, which again is NOT something you’d want
to do, for both performance and security reasons. There’s also another list of so-called “features”,
which seem to be additional related tools, so of course I’ll go and enable all those as well.
Now after we restart, things start to look a bit more interesting. All those services we enabled
now appear on the left side of the server manager, though there isn’t too much to see because
none of it is configured. You can see that most of them require you to run a “post deployment
configuration”, which is fancy talk for “you need to set them up”. Now I don’t want to go through
all that because I wouldn’t even know how, but there are a couple we can look into right from
the get-go, such as the Fax service. We can see how there’s menus for accounts, outgoing and
incoming settings, and while they’re empty, you can at least imagine how this would be used
to manage how the server works. There is even a section for cover letter templates that are
pre-installed which I wasn’t really expecting. Another example is “File and Storage” services,
which looks like it lets you manage storage across many devices and computers. For example, it also
lets you do stuff like scanning any drives, though I’m not sure how this would all look if there
were actually other computers under management. So if you have huge arrays of drives arranged in
pools, you can manage that sort of thing here. One thing you might have noticed from before,
is in the start menu there is a folder called “Administrative Tools”, you might wonder what
that is. And these for the most part are the same ones you’d find in regular Windows in the control
panel, and also in the start menu. However there are several tools that do not appear in regular
Windows, and these seem to mostly be associated with some of the ‘features’ I enabled from that
list before. For example there’s “Network Load Balancing Manager”, though I don’t think most
of us would have any use for that. I did make a list and compare the tools, and these are the
ones I found that are only on the server, so you can look at that if you’re interested. Again
though many of these seem to only show up if you install a related service or feature, they’re not
installed with a fresh install of Windows Server. Anyway moving on from that though, the last cool
thing I want to show you exclusive to Windows Servers is what’s called the Windows Admin Center.
You actually have to download this from Microsoft and install it separately, but it allows you
to remotely access and control the server via a web interface, from any regular computer.
And just looking through this, in my opinion, this is way more interesting than the server
manager. I think this might be mostly what you’d use after it’s all set up and you’re just
managing it day to day. You can do stuff like seeing files and storage devices, configure the
firewall, even edit the registry of the server. It also lets you see running processes and
installed apps almost like task manager, as well as see the roles and features we installed before.
One cool menu is the performance monitor, it lets you add different trackers for
performance like amount of memory and CPU usage, and then have it graphed like this. Or you can
have it displayed in other ways, like a table, or text or bar charts, whatever.
Now after seeing all this, you might be wondering if Windows Server is something you’d be
able to, or would want to install on an everyday computer. And the answer is technically
you could, but you probably don’t want to, if even just for the cost alone. The price of
the standard edition is $1,069 which I refuse to believe was not chosen as a meme, and the
Datacenter edition costs a whopping $6,155. But there’s also one called “Essentials” for $501…
Ok seriously who is coming up with these prices? Anyway despite these premium prices, as a desktop
user you would get absolutely no benefit. It’s not like anything would run any faster, it still
uses the same Kernel, or core of Windows as all the other editions. In fact some of your devices
may not work at all, since those consumer devices may not be validated and tested on Windows Server
editions, and therefore the drivers may refuse to install on that. Plus, the server version doesn’t
have many consumer focused services pre-installed, so things might not work as expected. For example
it’s missing the “Network Connected Devices Auto-Setup” services, parental controls, the
Windows Backup service, Wireless LAN AutoConfig, Bitlocker, and more. So don’t
think you’re missing out. But still, now you know more about it if
you were ever wondering, and if are someone who might be able to use a Windows Server in
the future for one of its true purposes, this might be helpful at least as a starting point.
Thanks again to Crucial for sponsoring this video, be sure to check out their SSD drives
including the X6, X8, and P5 Plus. And check the link for those in the description.
So let me know what you think down in the comments. If you have any corrections definitely
let me know, I know I’m not an expert here. And if you enjoyed this video, maybe check out
some of the other videos on my channel and consider subscribing. And also be sure to click
the bell next to the subscribe button if you do, to get notifications. I only make videos about
twice a week, you don’t want those getting lost in the rest of your subscriptions. If you want
to keep watching, the next video I’d recommend is one where I was talking about “Super Hidden”
files in Windows, I call them. It’s something not many people know about, so I think you’ll
find that interesting, I’ll put that link right there. So thanks so much for watching
everyone, and I’ll see you in the next one.
