Chapter 2. Installing and Upgrading to Windows Server 2008 R2

Experienced Windows Server administrators and consultants might feel the urge to skip this chapter. You might be thinking that you don't need to go through this material again. We urge you to think twice about that. We will be covering the fundamentals, but we will also be going through some details that you will probably not already know and that you will find useful.

Your first experience of Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 is probably going to be a manual installation of the operating system on a lab or virtual machine. Depending on the complexity of your environment and your upgrade/migration plans, you may decide to continue with manual installations or even consider automated installations. No matter what you choose, you'll probably want to read this chapter to understand what the typical installation steps are.

In this chapter, we'll focus on Windows Server 2008 R2. It's pretty similar to Windows Server 2008, but we'll point out and explain the differences. We'll cover a clean manual installation and a manual upgrade of Windows Server 2003. From there we'll delve into installation and upgrade strategies for Active Directory. If you are performing many installations of Windows Server, then you will like this next piece. We will discuss how you can save some time and keyboard wear and tear by automating your installations of Windows Server 2008 R2 using an unattended installation answer file that you will create using Windows System Image Manager.

In this chapter, you'll learn to:

• Upgrade your old servers

• Configure your server

• Build a small server farm