Add roles and features - Windows Server Tutorial

- [Instructor] After you have installed Windows Server 2019, and you've gone through the post-installation steps that you can find in step one here on the screen, Configure this local server, the next thing you would need to do is determine what the purpose of this server is going to be in your environment. And once you've determined that, you then can go through the process of adding roles and or features to help make that server take care of that purpose that you're trying to have it do. So, step two, here on the screen in the Server Manager you'll see it says Add roles and features. So I'm going to go ahead and click on that, and let's take a look at this wizard, let's see what roles and features we have available to us. So the first window that we get in this wizard is a Before you begin screen, which is just a quick reminder to say, hey, look, you're about to make this server something important. There's some significant service you're about to add to this server, so make sure it's nice and secure. And you do that through these three bullet points that we have here. The Administrator account should have a strong password, the network settings need to be configured appropriately, and you should have the latest and greatest security updates. Is this mandatory, no. Is it recommended, yes. You can choose to not have to see this screen. If you check the box saying Skip this page by default, it would skip over in the future. I'm going to go ahead and click Next. Here I need to choose, what installation type is this going to be? Are we just working on a single server, for just a basic role- or feature-based installation, which is what we're doing. Or, are we working in a virtual desktop infrastructure, what's called VDI, okay. So for now we are just talking about a single server, so I'm going to leave it with the default as a role- or feature-based installation, and I'm going to click Next. Now I need to choose, well, which server am I going to go ahead and add a role or feature onto? If I had more than one in my environment, I would see them on the list here, but I only have one, so I only see the one. And it's just this server, SERVER-1. But please understand that you don't have to be on the server that you are installing on. You can do this remotely. So I'll go ahead and click Next. And now is where we get to choose the different roles. And you can see, here is the list of different, you know, things that you know we can turn this server into. Right, we can make it a Certificate Server, we could make it a Domain Controller, or we could deal with Active Directory Federation Services, or Lightweight Directory Services, or even Rights Management Services. So there's a number of Active Directory options. And if you're not sure what any of these are, notice that when I'm highlighting 'em, over to the right they give you a description of what that role is. Alright, so you can see, we can continue down the list. There's a number of different options available. So just for the sake of selecting one, I'm going to go ahead and check the box next to Active Directory Domain Services. This would be to turn this machine into a Domain Controller. Now I want you to notice something when I check this box. When I check it, you get a little pop-up window that says, hey, there are other features that you have to have that go along with this role. So this is kind of nice, because that way the supporting features, all I have to do is click this one button that says, Add Features, and it will automatically select the additional features for me, rather than bother me about it later. At this point, I can click Next. It takes me to the Features screen. Now I can see what features it added. Right, here's Group Policy Management, for instance, that box got checked. If I scroll down here, we have our Remote Server Administration Tools. There might have been some other, deeper ones. Anytime you see a black box like this, that means that you can expand down and there's a checkbox inside, okay, that's what that means. And then you can see there's a longer list of features here than we had of roles. If there are any extra features that I know I need on this system, I could add them now. But I'm going to go ahead and click on Next. And then here is just a description of what Active Directory Domain Services is. I'll click Next. And I get to a confirmation screen. On the confirmation screen, it's just reminding me everything that I'm going to do. And all I have to do at this point is click Install. Now one other thing that I typically do, is I will check the box that says, Restart the destination server automatically if required. There used to be a lot of roles that required reboots, now only some of them do. But rather than trying to remember whether I need a reboot or not, I just check the box. And when I do, I get a little warning saying, hey, you know because you could be doing this remote, it's saying, someone could be logged into this server, are you sure you want to do this? I'm going to say, yep, I'm sure, and I'm going to click Install. Now at this point it's going to go through the installation, including doing a reboot, if necessary. But I'm not really worried about going the rest of the way here and showing you how to turn this machine all the way and configure it as a Domain Controller, but this is how you complete the process of adding a role or a feature.