In this lesson, I'll discuss installing Windows Server 2016. There are a few things that we need to understand about installing Windows Server 2016. So I'm going to install it on a virtual machine. The very first thing that pops up is the language. I'm going to click Next, because my language is English. I'm going to click the install now button, which will bring up a configuration screen. There are several options here. We have Windows Server 2016 Standard and Desktop Experience. The desktop experience means that we have a GUI installed. We want this addition. Next is accepting the license terms and we'll click Next after this. Then we want to custom install, because this is the first time that we are installing the operating system. If there are extra drives, we want to make sure that we select the drive that we want Windows install it. We can customize this through the screen shown here. Where do we want to install Windows? I'll click Next because it's the only drive I have. Since this is a virtual machine, the process takes a very small amount of time to install Windows, however, even on a general server, if it's a physical server, the installation process really only takes about five to ten minutes. It is a very, very quick installation, even if you have slower disks. While this is installing Windows, let's talk about the different versions of Windows that we have. You notice in the previous screen that we had, one of the previous screens, that we had Data Center and Standard Edition. Standard Edition is generally meant for a normal server. We're not going to do too much with it. We're not going to manage other computers with it. It's just a server that we're going to have applications on. The Data Center Edition, allows us to have more things like virtual machines running and the licenses are a little bit more expensive, because we're going to be running different programs that are really meant for a data center. Additionally with the desktop experience, that has changed over the past two versions of Windows. In Windows 2012, Windows Server 2012, rather, It was called, the non-GUI version of Windows was called the Core. Core really confused people, and so they actually moved to where it said desktop experience for the GUI version of Windows. So, it looks like my server's ready to restart and I'll go ahead and click Restart Now. Windows is going to restart the server several times while it finishes up installation. Specifically in this process, Windows is trying to figure out what kind of computer or server we're running and installs specific drivers in order to make sure the system works. Now that the computer, or the server's, ready to be used for the first time we have to enter some information. We need an administrator password that'll get us into the computer. Right now it doesn't have any requirements to the password length, but we'll just enter an eight character password. Now our computer's ready to be logged into. I'll type in the administrator password that I just set. Once Windows starts, you'll notice that we have a server manager that comes up. The server manager for Windows allows us to do specific tasks unlike a desktop Windows experience. This allows us to quickly manage the server when we need to. When you start the server we should see these two boxes here, and when the services start we'll see different services that need to be up and running and these will start to be turned on automatically. You'll notice that there are some services that have not started automatically. Let's go ahead and start these each one by one. Once the services have been started, you should see that your server is up and running and we shouldn't see anything that's red, indicating that there's a problem. In conclusion, Windows installation is extremely easy. There's not many options that we can do to streamline the process because it's already streamlined.
