You probably already know about the different versions of Windows like Home Edition, Pro, and even Enterprise. But there is another version of Windows for a very different kind of computer, which is called Windows Server. And while you may have heard of it, I ask you, how much do you really know about it?
For me the answer was basically nothing so I decided to find out, not just by doing some research, but also by installing it myself and poking around for the most interesting stuff, which I’ll show you. Turns out there are plenty of tools exclusive to Windows Server that we’ll see, like a Server Manager which is a major part, as well as for example, an Admin Center to control almost every aspect of the server through a web interface. So I think you’ll find this interesting, and by the end you’ll have a much better idea of how Windows Server is used.
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And with all that being said, let's continue. Alright first things first, let’s see what it’s like for the installation process of Windows server. So I’m using an ISO of the latest version, Windows Server 2022, and just putting it on a virtual machine.
You can see there are actually two server editions possible here, the standard Windows server, and the Datacenter edition which is the more expensive one, so let’s go with that. The main difference from a regular Windows installation though is here you can actually choose to install either with a desktop experience, or not, which is the graphic user interface. So that means you could run the server totally ‘headless’ it’s called, and just use command line to control it remotely.
And interestingly, this is the one it specifically recommends. But that wouldn’t be very interesting to show, so I’ll choose the GUI. Beyond that the installation process is the same, and eventually you boot up and have to create a user, and here’s another difference, which is you can’t choose a username, it has to be Administrator.
Once you boot into Windows, we can check out the more interesting stuff. So the first thing you’d notice is this “server manager” window pops up, which is basically how you configure everything on the server and install different services which we’ll go over. As for the interface, it’s basically the same as the Windows 10 desktop, also with the Windows 10 start menu, not the Windows 11 one.
You can also see there’s zero bloatware obviously, and you can actually see how little there is in the start menu at all. Another unexpected difference is if you go to shut down the server, it actually asks you the reason and whether it was planned or not, I guess so it can be recorded in the log files for reference, since presumably the server shouldn’t be shutting down or restarting very often. Someone can go look back and see why that happened.
Let’s get back to that server manager though, because it’s a really central part of what we’ll be seeing. Now to understand what we’re looking at, let me give you some context. You see, a Windows server, or any server really, can have one or multiple dedicated purposes, which in Windows Server are called “roles”.
So if you’re at a big company, you might have one server that handles network routing stuff like DNS, another one that handles printing, and another one for file storage and backup, or whatever else. So one of the first things you would have to do is install the associated “services” they’re called, for whatever particular roles you want for this server. And you can see there is an option to “Add Roles and Features” where you do just that.
There are many options, and from my understanding, in most cases each server will be dedicated to only one or a couple roles, assuming there’s the budget for it. But this video is NOT most cases, we want to see everything. So I’ll just enable them all, which again is NOT something you’d want to do, for both performance and security reasons.
There’s also another list of so-called “features”, which seem to be additional related tools, so of course I’ll go and enable all those as well. Now after we restart, things start to look a bit more interesting. All those services we enabled now appear on the left side of the server manager, though there isn’t too much to see because none of it is configured.
You can see that most of them require you to run a “post deployment configuration”, which is fancy talk for “you need to set them up”. Now I don’t want to go through all that because I wouldn’t even know how, but there are a couple we can look into right from the get-go, such as the Fax service. We can see how there’s menus for accounts, outgoing and incoming settings, and while they’re empty, you can at least imagine how this would be used to manage how the server works.
There is even a section for cover letter templates that are pre-installed which I wasn’t really expecting. Another example is “File and Storage” services, which looks like it lets you manage storage across many devices and computers. For example, it also lets you do stuff like scanning any drives, though I’m not sure how this would all look if there were actually other computers under management.
So if you have huge arrays of drives arranged in pools, you can manage that sort of thing here. One thing you might have noticed from before, is in the start menu there is a folder called “Administrative Tools”, you might wonder what that is. And these for the most part are the same ones you’d find in regular Windows in the control panel, and also in the start menu.
However there are several tools that do not appear in regular Windows, and these seem to mostly be associated with some of the ‘features’ I enabled from that list before. For example there’s “Network Load Balancing Manager”, though I don’t think most of us would have any use for that. I did make a list and compare the tools, and these are the ones I found that are only on the server, so you can look at that if you’re interested.
Again though many of these seem to only show up if you install a related service or feature, they’re not installed with a fresh install of Windows Server. Anyway moving on from that though, the last cool thing I want to show you exclusive to Windows Servers is what’s called the Windows Admin Center. You actually have to download this from Microsoft and install it separately, but it allows you to remotely access and control the server via a web interface, from any regular computer.
And just looking through this, in my opinion, this is way more interesting than the server manager. I think this might be mostly what you’d use after it’s all set up and you’re just managing it day to day. You can do stuff like seeing files and storage devices, configure the firewall, even edit the registry of the server.
It also lets you see running processes and installed apps almost like task manager, as well as see the roles and features we installed before. One cool menu is the performance monitor, it lets you add different trackers for performance like amount of memory and CPU usage, and then have it graphed like this. Or you can have it displayed in other ways, like a table, or text or bar charts, whatever.
Now after seeing all this, you might be wondering if Windows Server is something you’d be able to, or would want to install on an everyday computer. And the answer is technically you could, but you probably don’t want to, if even just for the cost alone. The price of the standard edition is $1,069 which I refuse to believe was not chosen as a meme, and the Datacenter edition costs a whopping $6,155.
But there’s also one called “Essentials” for $501… Ok seriously who is coming up with these prices? Anyway despite these premium prices, as a desktop user you would get absolutely no benefit. It’s not like anything would run any faster, it still uses the same Kernel, or core of Windows as all the other editions.
In fact some of your devices may not work at all, since those consumer devices may not be validated and tested on Windows Server editions, and therefore the drivers may refuse to install on that. Plus, the server version doesn’t have many consumer focused services pre-installed, so things might not work as expected. For example it’s missing the “Network Connected Devices Auto-Setup” services, parental controls, the Windows Backup service, Wireless LAN AutoConfig, Bitlocker, and more.
So don’t think you’re missing out. But still, now you know more about it if you were ever wondering, and if are someone who might be able to use a Windows Server in the future for one of its true purposes, this might be helpful at least as a starting point. Thanks again to Crucial for sponsoring this video, be sure to check out their SSD drives including the X6, X8, and P5 Plus.
And check the link for those in the description. So let me know what you think down in the comments. If you have any corrections definitely let me know, I know I’m not an expert here.
And if you enjoyed this video, maybe check out some of the other videos on my channel and consider subscribing. And also be sure to click the bell next to the subscribe button if you do, to get notifications. I only make videos about twice a week, you don’t want those getting lost in the rest of your subscriptions.
If you want to keep watching, the next video I’d recommend is one where I was talking about “Super Hidden” files in Windows, I call them. It’s something not many people know about, so I think you’ll find that interesting, I’ll put that link right there. So thanks so much for watching everyone, and I’ll see you in the next one.
