Explore these essential guidelines designed to enhance the management and performance of Windows Servers. Each rule provides insights on optimizing updates, ensuring system uptime, and improving resource allocation for a more efficient server environment.
We all know it’s important to keep our servers updated. Unfortunately though, by default, Windows will automatically download and install all new Windows Updates on your servers. This will mean the servers will occasionally restart to install updates when you don’t want them too. You will also get annoying popups trying to get you to restart the computer.
After a new Service Pack is released for a product (for example, Exchange 2010 Service Pack 1), users and management can get very excited about new features that the Service Pack will bring that will help them out, or fix problems that they had been having with the product.
Microsoft generally test their Service Packs very well, but things can go wrong.
As a general rule, we wait 4 weeks before installing a new Service Pack, and tell everyone to hold their horses.
Downtime occurs when you have a single server setup.
TODO: This is 2008 R2 – update to 2016 Note: 2008 R2 was not as reliable as later versions. So it would be better to use failover cluster in Server 2012 R2 or 2016 for a more reliable infrastructure configuration.
Use NLB to allow load balancing and failover. On each of your Windows Servers, you will host your website.
You need to follow these steps to get it up and running:
If you are dealing with a single server, there is no way to achieve 100% uptime, when updating or restarting a server.
So set your website up correctly with at least 2 front ends, and 1 backend (the SQL Server).
It is important install your printers automatically to all clients that logon to the domain.
For PCs that are not in the domain, the printers won’t be automatically installed.
So you should add a DNS alias which maps \printer to your print server.
A “Too slow” is not enough info.
Windows Server has a built-in solution for auditing who accessed your files in a file share or non-shared files in your file system, but it is turned off by default.
Windows has a built-in storage solution called Storage Spaces that allows you to group 3 or more storage drives to create a bigger pool; however, that technology, whilst useful, has some better third-party contenders like Drive Bender, which does the same thing better and faster.
When using service accounts, you should have a specific AD account for each major service.