Subtitles of the Movie

OK. In Part 1 and Part 2 of Roles and Features, we discussed Roles and the Roles that a server can have. Now in Part 3, let's talk about Features and how they relate to Roles. You will notice inside the Server Manager, and just as a quick review, I went to the Windows Server Desktop, I click on Start and I opened the Server Manager to get here. And you will notice in the MMC that pops up I have Roles and that's where I chose my Roles, but then I have Features and I can click on Features. Now, notice I have three of 35 features installed. OK? Now Features don't describe the primary function of the server. That's what our Role does. I may choose a Server Role such as a File Server, but then I can add Features that augment or add to the functionality of that Role. So let's just say, for example, that I add the File Services Role to my server, which means I'm going to dedicate this particular server to storing and sharing files with the clients on my network. The Feature that I can add to that, for example, would be Fail-Over Clustering. So then I can cluster this box with another one so that if it fails, the other one takes over. So basically think of Features as they add extra capabilities or extra functionality to the Roles. So if I click on Add Features here, it's going to kick off the Add Features Wizard and I just want to kind of real quickly go through the list and let's talk about some of these features that you can add and turn on. First one up, you'll notice .NET Framework 3.0 Features and this basically exposes the .NET 2.0 APIs and then some of the extensions in the .NET 3.0 Framework to you. Bit Locker, Drive Encryption, this helps protect data on lost, stolen or inappropriately decommissioned computers. It encrypts the entire volume, OK? Data is encrypted only if the various components are successfully verified and the encrypted drive's located in the original computer, blah, blah, blah and this is just a great way, this is an additional level of making sure that our data is safe, even when this computer's lost, stolen, we get rid of it. There's all kinds of horror stories in the news out there about government agencies getting rid of computers and they send them to the dump and there's all this personal information about people on there. You have bits, server extensions, this is Background Intelligent Transfer Service and this lets a server receive files uploaded by clients using bits. This lets computers transfer files in the background or foreground asynchronously which means that the responsiveness of other applications and everything is not as taxed, if you will. So it makes everything feel a lot faster and a lot better. And I won't go through all these. There's 35. Notice Fail-Over Clustering is in here, Internet Printing Client. Notice some of these other ones that you'll see. Network Load Balancing; this is where we get this in Windows Server 2008. Remote Assistance. Notice Remote Server Administration Tools. This is part of the Terminal Services Functionality. RPC over HTTP; if you're using that, for example, in Outlook. This is where you get that. SMTP Server, SNMP Services, if you're using any kind of SNMP diagnostics. Notice your Telnet Server, Telnet clients are in here. We will talk about Windows PowerShell a little bit later on. WinServer; do you need WinServer anymore? Usually not unless you have really old applications that are dependent on Win. But should you need it, it is now a feature that you add to one of your roles. So that basically is Features. You need to look through the list and read about them and see what's out there. So here's the bottom line; you got to set up a new server. Then you're going to determine, OK, what is this server going to do on my network? Then you're going to give that server a Role and I'm going to cancel out here. Notice we're going to go into Roles and we'll give our server a Role. We will click here and we will Add a Role. We'll kick off the wizard, we'll add one of these Roles. Once we finish that, then we're going to then add whatever Features we want to add to what Role we just gave the server. OK? So you'll get comfortable with this. Just read up on it and see how it works. Again, notice the way it lets you set your server up. You know exactly what your server's doing. You know exactly what's there. This greatly reduces the attack surface of the server. We don't have all these weird services and ports and weird things open in the background that exposes us to hacker activity and it means that we're not using any CPU time on our server for something that we're not actually using and we're not consuming RAM, any service that we're not actually using. I like this feature. This is a really cool setup now. So anyway, a little different than what you've seen before in the Windows Server environment, but a whole lot better.