Foreword

Windows Server is in its third decade of existence, and rather than showing its age by doing the same old thing with a few more features and maybe a new interface or the like, Windows Server has made some remarkable transitions over the years. In the 1990s, Windows Server was squarely an application server operating system providing the core engine for server-based applications like Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, or basic file and print services. In the 2000s, Microsoft added a fundamental service with Active Directory to become the de facto authentication mechanism for enterprises around the world; and a decade’s worth of improvements in clustering for high availability along with branch office computing services were added to enhance the functionality of Windows Server for the growing enterprise information technology (I.T.) model.

This latest release of Windows Server is yet another major transition of the product line to now support cloud scale, cloud efficiency, and cloud reliability. As organizations stretch their datacenters to include a hybrid on premise and cloud model, to public cloud and hosted datacenter providers offering alternative models of datacenter services, Windows Server 2016 has met the challenge of having core functionality in security, multi-tenancy, lower cost scalability, and the ability to perform rolling updates in a truly zero-downtime cloud environment.

For this edition, Jeffrey Shapiro stepped up to handle all the content revisions for Windows Server 2016 Unleashed. Jeff has been testing and deploying Microsoft server technology since 1993 and was one of the first to implement Active Directory before it was officially released with Windows 2000 Server. He is thus a fitting addition to our team.

Windows Server 2016 has met the challenges of the evolving cloud-enterprise datacenter, and the content of this book dives into the new functionality that provides the fundamental basis desired and required of organizations in this new world of I.T.

—Rand Morimoto, Ph.D., MCSE, CISSP