Transcripts
1. About this Class + Project Tasks: Hi, welcome to Skillshare. My name is Emilia. I'm a tech professional
and try and an educator. I love technology and
hopefully you do too. And over the next number
of lessons in this class, we're gonna be talking about Active Directory and
domain controllers. Specifically how to actually build your own
domain controller. We're gonna be covering
a lot of material over the next three specific lessons Around what is the domain, what is the purpose of a domain? What is Active Directory? What are the differences
between the two of these? We'll also cover how to actually download and set up your
own Windows Server. Because of course you need
Windows Server definitely be installed on a
physical server, on a virtual server. That you can actually then
promote that server into a domain controller and run
Active Directory. Of course. And then last section we're
going to cover exactly that. How to set up your own
domain controller and how to set up a day and
get it up and running. We're not going to
cover how to use Active Directory and all
the other bits and pieces. We do have a completely
separate class for that. You can check that out
on my Skillshare page. But what I recommend for you to do is of course, as always, follow along, but you need
to go and do this yourself. So as part of this, you need to correct
yourself a project. I'm gonna give you some tasks. And these tasks
will be going and defining what is the domain
and what is Active Directory. You need to understand
what a domain and Active Directories
understand the differences
between H and why they are important
in a business. You then need to go and download your own copy of Windows Server. And we're doing this
Windows Server 2022. If you're running
an early version of Windows Server,
that will be fine. We're going to show you
how to actually go and get it from the
Microsoft website. So you go and do that yourself, download yourself the
ISO of Windows Server. You then need to
get that ISO audits some sort of bootable media
if you're going to install it on a physical server or onto a VMware or Hyper-V or
virtualization environments, we can actually build it as a VM and install
Windows Server as a VM. Once Windows Server
is installed, we're then going to go and get
a domain controller setup. So you need to go and
do this yourself, go and promote that
Windows server to a domain controller installed the roles install the features, definitely get that
DC up and run. You're going to need
to give a domain name, DNS settings, all of that. And then once that's done, after a few reboots, you're going to open up
Active Directory and then your journey begins from there, it actually learning and
working in Active Directory. Best thing to do is to
have your own computer, your own set of computers, your own lab environment, whether you're doing this
at home or in a business. Follow along, let us know
in the project section how you're doing and how if you're doing this
in a lab environment, in a test environment, why
don't you take a photo of it, share it with the class, share it on the project section. And as always,
feel free to reach out to me if you
have any questions, if you get stuck and if you
need any further assistance. That's a little bit about the
introduction of what we're gonna be covering in this class. Let's now start talking about domains and Active Directory.
2. What is a Domains and Active Directory: So we're going to
put you, Cynthia, are I give you an
overview around what a domain is and what
is Active Directory. Now, AD specifically is
a Microsoft technology. So Microsoft have
developed this or anything use across a lot
of different organizations. Ad is sort of the, I guess, the foundation that a lot of companies will use
when it comes to administering a lot of the networks and all of the
security around networks. Now there are others out
there that are sort of competing against Active
Directory specifically, but AD really is
the clear winner, the clear market leader. Knowing Active
Directory is almost like foundational if
you want to work in IT, if you want to improve
in your skills in IT. So AD is essentially a
centralized hierarchy, repository of user objects, of all sorts of objects
or end-users computers, security groups that
essentially used for your network to be able to authenticate against a domain. So it's almost like a gatekeeper to be able to allow a user, e.g. that logs into a computer, it authenticates
against the domain and Active Directory and
then grants that use the access permissions to
specific thing on the network. So all of these objects, user objects, computer
objects, server objects, all of this stuff that
is inactive directory is actually stored within a domain that sits
within Active Directory. So the domain is the
central container, the central database where objects authenticate
against and all of that process essentially
is managed within Active Directory to
actually go and configure a domain and a Active
Directory environment, it needs to be set up
within a domain controller. So you may have heard the
term domain controller. So you'll have yourself
a Windows Server, e.g. Windows Server 2019. You then convert
that Windows Server into a domain controller. And by converting it to
a domain controller, you then install
a whole bunch of AD tools, Active
Directory tools, which then make your domain
controller essentially an AD server and Active Directory server with a relevant domain. When you're configuring
your domain controller, you allocate a domain to it so you give
it a specific name. So domain is essentially
just a database. You're going to give it a name. So e.g. my home.com, that becomes your domain. Think about e.g. on the web. Now, you've got an
Internet browser and you go to google.com. Or google.com is
a domain that is obviously publicly available
out on the Internet. Your domain is almost
like a private network, domain name that you give
within your organization. It can be public as well, but generally your domain within an Active Directory
environment is for you internally and all
of your objects on your network or your relevant
objects on your network, all talk and communicate
with your domain and managed all within
Active Directory when you are configuring
a domain controller, you've also got what's
called a forest. So you've got a forest
and the domain, we're not gonna go into
too much detail here. But essentially I forest is the top level and then the domain is what sits
within the forest. So you can have multiple
domains within a central force. Now why would you want
to do this now if you're in a smaller organization, perhaps a forest with
a specific name. So you can still call it my
company.com as the firstName. And then the domain inside of
it could be my company.com. And that's really just
the domain sitting within a forest if you're in
a larger organization. So let's say you've got
hundreds of thousands and thousands of staff. You may want to have
different domains or multiple domains all sitting
within a centralized first. So your force is almost
like your top level. And then you might have, let's say you've got a forest
called my company.com. And within that company, there were actually
three sub companies. So let's say in the real-world, you've got a company
called google.com. And within Google,
there's actually a lot of sub Google companies. There's not just google.com
is just the parent company, Well, as a parent
company above them. But there's also little
sub companies, right? So this is something
you have to think about when you're configuring your network because he
could have my company i.com, my company b.com, I Company
c.com, different staff, different levels of permissions, different computers, and they can't really
talk to each other. We really don't want them
to talk to each other, but they all sit within
the parent company, which is your first. So that's sort of a little
bit around the overviews. You can set up what's called domain trust
between the domains. You can share resources between all of these
sort of stuff. We're getting very, very advanced and you'll
probably already lost with what we're talking about forest top-level
domain underneath that. And you can have multiple
domains within a single forest. Now, what helps me
is always to look at a visual diagram of
what this looks like. So you can see right here
what we're talking about. We should really
show you a bit of an overview around the
domain controller. And then you've got your
Active Directory, your domain, as well as your
forest and all of your Active Directory
domains sitting within it. So that's really how it
works. On a nutshell. It's very, very great
and it's foundational.
3. Setup a Windows Server: The great thing
about Windows Server is that you can install
it in various places. If you're doing this in
a real life environment, in a production environment,
in a company, e.g. if you're doing this
in your home lab, if you're just watching
this to learn about it. So then you can put
that into practice in a rural business will of course, Where are you going to
install Windows Server? You're gonna be
installing it either on some form of a
physical computer, visible computer or
physical Rack Server, a blade server, some sort of
physical hardware somewhere, could be in a server and
could be in a comms room, could be in a data
center somewhere. You could also be
installing it within a virtualization environment to some sort of a
virtual hypervisor could be running
something like VMware. It could be running
something like Citrix or Hyper-V by Microsoft, whatever those options,
you could also set up as a virtual machine in a
virtualization environment. And then you could also be
sitting this on the Cloud. So if you're running
something like AWS or Microsoft Azure, one of those two, you're going to also
be installing it on the Cloud or even
Google as well. To regardless of
where you're gonna be sticking Windows Server 2022, just be aware that the steps may vary a little bit depending on what
you're gonna be doing. This video is going to now
focus on how to actually get and download
Windows Server 2022, and then how to actually install it and get it running
in your environment. Now, for this demo, for the demo that you
are looking at here, what I'm gonna be doing
is I'm doing this in a virtualization environment. I'm running VMware, so I'm
running a VMware ESX Hosts, it's essentially a hypervisor. It's a physical computer
that's got ES6 I installed, that is the operating
system and then I'm building a VM within it. So what I'm gonna be doing is
I'm going to be downloading Windows Server off the Microsoft website
completely for free. So you can use a
completely for free, for 180 days, for a free trial. But then of course, you're
gonna have to go and buy Windows Server if
you're going to want to continue to use it. If you're doing this
in your home lab for your own testing, then you could build it and then he could go and
build another one. And then every time you
rebuild a brand new instance, you're gonna get a whole
180 days extra for every instance of
Windows Server that you're going to actually
go and configure, so just be aware of that. So what we're gonna be
doing is we are gonna be downloading the ISO file of Windows Server 2022 off
the Microsoft website. And then what you do
with that ISO file is completely up to you
whether you're going to go and boot that onto a USB stick
with it and putting it on a DVD drive and then
sticking it into a physical computer and
then booting off that. You can boot that physical, physical device, physical
computer off the bios. You can say it's
Boudin from your USP, which has that ISO in there. And then you can
actually install the installation that way. Or in my case, I'm
gonna be doing this in VMware where I create a new virtual machine
and then point to that VM and actually start
the installation that way. So just be aware that I'm doing this in a
virtualization environment, but yours may be
slightly different, but the main focus of this video is how to get that ISO itself. And then how to actually
start the installation and go through the configuration
of that virtual machine. So on here on my computer, I've just gone in and said
download Windows Server 2022. And you'll see that
right at the very top. You've got a winner. So 2.22 on Microsoft
Evaluation Center. So I'm going to select
right there to say Windows Server 2022
evaluation for 180 days. Now of course, the great
thing is you can go and get yourself previous versions
of Windows Server. If you do want to try
Windows 2019, Windows 2016, even down to Windows 12, Windows 2012, then you can
go and download those. You've also got
other versions of Hyper-V if you wanted to
go and try all of this. This is the great
thing about Microsoft, is that they let you
fully try a lot of this service software without
you having to buy it. You can try before you buy
for at least the 180 days. In some instances, you'll
see that it says unlimited, which is actually quite cool, but others are 180 days. So there's a few options. You can try Windows
Server on Azure. You can create a Windows
Server VM in Azure. In Azure, you can
download the ISO, you can download the VHD. Now, in our case, we're gonna be looking at downloading the ISO. But if you are running
a VMware, sorry, if you are running a
Microsoft Azure instance somewhere on your cloud, then you can actually go and
try it directly on there. And you are going to
have to connect this to Azure environment
in some instances. So we're not gonna be
covering that in this video, but just be aware that that
is a possibility for you. But of course, the whole
point of this is we're going to download the ISO
itself. So here it is. Download the ISO for
Windows Server 2022. And you click on Download. It's not going to ask
you some information about the company. Now, it doesn't have
to be necessarily the real information
if you are going to be using this in a trial
in your own home environment. But if you aren't gonna be
doing this in a business, then it's best to
put it in the right details so that Microsoft at least know that you are
downloading a copy of it. And then if you
need any support, they've got some of those
details already there. So putting your relevant
details into here. Then we click on Continue. Once that's been done, you select your
relevant language, what language of Windows Server you want to
be downloading. I'm going to be getting
my English version, select Download, and then
that will start to download. You'll see that it's
downloading. And right here, Server evil 64 is a 64-bit
edition of Windows Server. It's five gig big, so we'll take a
little bit of time depending on your
internet connection. Once it's downloaded,
you'll have that ISO. And then we can continue
the next steps. And as I said, we're gonna
be doing this in VMware, but the installation
of Windows Server is the important part
as part of this video, of course, what I
wanna do is I want to create a brand new
virtual machine. Now in my case, I've got my ISO file that I've
just downloaded, and then I need to add this
to what's called a datastore, which is the hard-drive space that is detected on my
VM or environments, then I can point to it in
my VMware environments. Let's just do that
very, very quickly. We're going to upload our
ISO into our Datastore. We're going to right-click
and say Browse. I've already got a folder called ISOS and I'm going to upload my ISO into there with
the ISO now uploaded, we're gonna go back
to virtual machines and I'm going to
create a brand new VM. I'm going to create a
new virtual machine and then give it
a relevant name. I'm going to call it
home demo or three. You see that I've already
got another couple. Home demo, O1 and
O2 compatibility. The OS version, Windows. Now of course we
don't have windows Server 2022 available on
this version of ESX psi. So just pick the latest one. It's more just for configuration
more than anything else. If you are interested
in learning a little bit more about
VMware in general, if this is something that's
completely new to you, I do have a full
length training course available specifically
on VMware, so you may want to check
that out if you're wanting to learn a little
bit more about VMware, specifically how to use ES6 psi, how to get it set up for free, then how to get ESX psi working within a cluster using vCenter and all of
the other conflicts. You can check that out
if you are interested. I'm going to select
the data store where we want that VM to sit. Within. Of course, config up our VM and how much resources
do we want to give it? So we're going to
say, we'll leave it as oldest and one CPU. We're gonna give it
full gig of RAM. And now I'm going
to actually go and select right down here my ISO. And I go and pointed at ISO that I just literally downloaded. In my case, I've got
a separate ice or heat of Windows Server 2022. Here it is. Select that one. Happy with that next summary of what's going to happen
and we can select Finish. So that has now created the
shell here it is over here. Home demo or three. And now we're going
to right-click on it and say power on. We'll now do is we're
now going to go and console into it so I can
see what's going on. I'm going to open
it in a new tab. If you're saying something like this and you
are going to be presented with a Windows
Server Setup screen. He got, he got the logo. This is great. It means that we're
in a good position. It means that the
VMware environment or whatever environment
you're using has detected that ISO and is mounted that I saw
on that computer. And now we can install the actual installation
of Windows Server itself. So the installation is gonna
be pretty straightforward. If you're ever familiar with
installing Windows 781011, the steps aren't gonna be
too different in this case, where it gets a little
bit more complicated from a server perspective. Once you're actually in the Windows Server and
understanding some of the differences with
a Windows Server compared to a Windows clients. So we're just gonna go and set up all of our standard
stuff in here, our language, our time
currency, so we can click on, continue on next if you're
happy with that, install, now, know what version
you're gonna be running now there's a couple of different options or
four options in total. One is a standard evaluation, the other one is a data
center evaluation. And then you've
got a couple which it says desktop experience. And what these are, these are, if you read it
right, standard edition. This is the recommended. This option emits most of the Windows graphical
environment managing with the command
prompt or PowerShell. So this is where you
have to be a little bit more up-to-date with
the command line, with the PowerShell and
with the Admin Center, it's going to minimize any of the fancy graphical
user interface that is available in commonly with Windows Server or any sort
of Windows operating system. You've got data center, which of course is a little
bit more advanced, has a lot more
options available. But the version that we are
going to be demoing here is the desktop experience
where it's going to install some
additional features. So you can actually use it with a standard
keyboard and mouse. And there's a graphical
user interface as opposed to just command line. But either way, if you are
somebody who's gonna be administering Windows
Server in some extent, it is good to understand
the command line. I understand PowerShell because it will make your life easy as an administrator
if you can trigger certain actions over
the command line. So we're going to
select Data Center evaluation desktop
experience, and select Next. If you're happy with
those terms and conditions, you can read those. I'm not going to select custom install Microsoft Server
Operating System. Here is my disk, so I've allocated a 40 gig disk. And of course, if you're in
your VMware environment, if you're Citrix, whatever, you can actually change, you can make this bigger
before you even get commenced. You can make it smaller. It's really up to you if you're running on a
physical computer, if you're running on
the cloud somewhere, that is the disk size
that's gonna be there. But at the moment, you will
see that it is unallocated. Nothing has really happened. There hasn't been a
partition set up, it hasn't been formatted. So we're just going
to select that disk, right in that state, in that state and select Next, that will then create the partition and
will then format it. And then the installation
will commence. Alright, that is, they are done. Now, it's starting to do all of the preliminary
setup steps to start installing our Windows
Server operating system. And then once this is done, your actual server, your
VM, whatever it may be, we'll reboot a few times and then we're going
to be presented with a login screen when we
start the configuration of our Windows Server were then
presented with a space. We need to add your password. Now this is an administrator. So by default this is the
username is administrator, and this is gonna
be the password. And Reese entered the password, making sure that is
very, very secure. This is the god right. This is essentially full
rights to this Windows Server. So you want to make sure that
it is going to be secure. Even if you are going
to be connecting these windows
server to a domain, to Active Directory, which
I hope that you will, because we're gonna be covering Active
Directory in how to use all of that
in future videos. But if you are going
to be doing that, make sure that you
still set up a very, very secure password
because he can bypass Active Directory and login
with this administrative. So do make it very
complex, very secure. And now we login. We have Windows
server configured, it's now downloaded,
it's now installed. So before we even start building a domain controller and all
of those other settings, we need to learn
a little bit more about where our Windows Server, including how to do some
basic configuration. So we need to set the host name. We just had an IP address where to go and do some
other configurations. Because ultimately, yes,
I'm here connected to a VMware environment
and I'm consulting, essentially just opening
up a console to these VM. Ideally, you want to be
able to remote into it using your remote
desktop connection. So we're going to show
you how to actually get that setup as well. So you can actually manage it and actually set it up a little.
4. Building a DC (Domain Controller) for AD: Data domain. You can't really have
computers talking to each other in
a meaningful way. So we're going to be setting up a number of computers,
of course, on a network. In a real-life network, you want all those computers
to be able to talk, communicate with each other, communicate with a domain, communicate with
Active Directory, centrally manage users and groups and servers
and everything, all from Active Directory. Push out group policies
against these computers, use DNS, dhcp, all of
these technologies. But the foundational component
is active directory, setting up a domain. And of course you
do that with what's called a domain controller. Essentially, the
domain controller is what controls your domain. Now, you've built your
Windows Server 2022. We've allocated it
a specific name. We've already have
given it a DC name so that we know this is gonna be
for our domain controller. We've given it a
irrelevant IP address. Now we're going to
go and actually set up the role and the feature to convert
this Windows Server, which at the moment is
not doing anything. We convert it and make it
into a domain controller. So what we're gonna do is
we're going to open up our server manager on our
Windows Server right over here. It's in our Start Menu
and Server Manager. And we're going to now select, Add Roles and Features,
and click on that. Next, we're gonna do role-based or feature-based
installation. We're gonna do it
on this server. Remember that you can do this
on other service or e.g. if you want to go and
install some particular role or feature or domain controller
role on another server. You can actually go
and search for it and add it to a server
pool and do it that way. But we're just doing it
on our standard one here. Now this is where
we actually go and configure the server role. So this is essentially where
you install the software, think about it as an
additional feature, additional software
and an add-on that you add to the
server to actually have the ability to now act as
a domain controller to create a domain and have the Active Directory
environment all configured. But the one we're primarily
looking at is the second one. The other ones can be used
for different purposes. Once you've set up an initial Active Directory
Domain Environment and they get a lot
more advanced. They're not gonna be
covered in this course, but they can do a lot of additional features in terms of connecting things together, managing certificates, doing all these
other great things. But that's for another session. Here is add features that are required for Active
Directory Domain Services. So if you remember, this is
the area where you're adding server roles and features. The role is our Active
Directory Domain Services. But then it's saying, hey, if you want to install Active
Directory Domain Services, you also need to install all
of these features with it. Because without these features and you're not
gonna get the best, you're not gonna be
able to have this thing working the way that it should. So along with the
Active Directory role, The Domain Services
role is going to go and add group policy management. So here we are already
in preparation for a future video where we're gonna be talking
about Group Policies. Here you are preparing that
by actually installing the Group Policy
Management feature into your domain controller and some other
remote server tools, AD DS, etc, in there. So you want to include
management tools if applicable. Yeah, we'll take
that when I click on Next, click on Next. So Active Directory Domain
Services or AD DS for short, stores information about users, computers, and other
devices on the network. It helps administrators securely manage this information and facilitates resources sharing, collaboration between users. There's a couple of things
he didn't note to help ensure that users can still
log onto the network. In the case of a server outage, install a minimum of two domain
controllers for a domain. Now we talked about
this previously. I recommend more than
one domain controller because if your primary
domain controller goes down, you're going to have a problem. Remember that your domain controller using Active
Directory in your domain, your computers and other
devices on your network. I gonna be authenticated. They're gonna be bound to these Active Directory
domain controller. If your domain
controller goes down, becomes offline,
someone accidentally disconnected or powers
it down or whatever. Then these devices, these users will not be able
to login to their computers. They won't be able
to authenticate against the domain controller. So it's very important that
you have more than one, because if you have
more than one, if your first one goes down, then computers can still
talk to the second one. If you're in a
larger organization, it's not uncommon
that you'll have pools of domain
controllers if you're in an organization that has multiple states or it's
in multiple countries, then you're going to
have domain controllers specifically set up
in different regions, perhaps around the world
that all talk to each other. And they're all part of a
pool of domain controllers. Because that is the
best way to make sure that systems can
stay operational. That's the first point. The second point is AD DS requires a DNS server to be
installed on the network. If you do not have a
Danish server installed, you will be prompted to install the DNS server role
on this machine. Now, future video, we're
gonna be talking about DNS. We're gonna be showing you DNS. We're gonna be talking about
some of the DNS records. What is DNS useful? Now we haven't talked
about that yet. But here, very similarly
to group policy, where it's going to be
pre-configured during some of the Group Policy features and the installation
software that it needs. It will also do the same thing
here for your DNS server. So if this is the first
domain controller that you're building
and there is no DNS server already existing
on your network somewhere, then this is where actually install your first DNS server. So it'll install the software, the features needed for DNS so that in a future video when
we are talking about DNS, those roles are already installed and they
are ready to go. Now the last point there is around Azure Active Directory, which is a separate
online account, can provide simplified identity, identity and access management. We won't cover that in this course, that's
for another course, but this one is specifically
focused here on our on-premise building
the domain controller within your home or
office environment. So we're going to select Next. It's always good to take this, restart the destination
server automatically for quiet and we can
click on Install. Now that role will
start to get installed, the features will start
to get installed and if it needs a reboot,
it will reboot. Your Windows Server. Installation has now finished. We can now click on Close. You see that now on the very far left in the navigation area, you've got dashboard,
you got local server, and you got all server,
you got file server, and your AD DS. So these two things were added as part of
our installation. Part of adding these
roles and features, you've now got these
additional little areas here that have been added
to our Windows Server. The first one here of
course, being our AD DS. So this is now an AD services. It's got a overview. This is the server. It's online. Looks good. And then the bottom
is some events talking about this
thing called dfs. Dfs is something that we
won't cover in this course, but essentially, it's something
around File Services. Where you have a file server, you have multiple file services, and then you can sort of share some resources and make
it easier to manage file server services using
this protocol called DFS. But we'll cover that
in another course. Either way, you've got this little warning at
the very top up here saying configuration
required for Active Directory
Domain Services. Now this is in regards to that promotion that we
were just talking about. So we can click on more tasks. And you'll see that it
says additional steps are required to make this
machinery domain controller. Here is a little
summary of the task. Now, we can click on promote this server to a
domain controller. Now there are three
options available to us. Really depends on what the configuration state of
your domain is in a network. So the first option here is add a domain controller to
an existing domain, added domain to an
existing forest, and add a new forest. Now add a domain controller
to an existing domain. So this is in the
event the first two, do you have some sort of a domain already in existence
in an organization? So let's say you're
doing this in a lab environment or in
a real life company, then you've got to ask yourself the question is a
domain already there? If there is a domain
already there, then you don't need
to go and configure a brand new domain or
a brand new forest. We'll talk about these
in a little bit. You don't have to
do that because there's already something there. So you may want to just add your domain controller
to an existing domain. Or you can do an add a new
domain to an existing forest. So if there's already
something in existence, then there are the
options that you pick. If there's nothing in existence, if you're configuring a
domain here from scratch, something completely brand new, then you do what's
called add a new forest. They're essentially a
force in the domain there. A little bit similar, but a
forest is the parent level. The forest is at the
very, very top level. And then there's a domain
that sits within the forest. So one forest can have
multiple domains. You could have Domain one
domain to domain three, and they all sit under
one single forest. So when we actually select, Add a new forest, you're creating the
forest with a name. And you're creating the domain within that forest with
a particular name. Or it could be the
exactly the same name. That forest could be called
the same thing as the domain. So what this is saying is added domain controller to
an existing domain. Well, this is saying there's an existing domain out there
which is part of a forest, but we're not talking
about just the domain. We want to add a new
domain controller because you want to
give that domain, maybe an additional
domain controller for better redundancy
for failover so that if one domain controller fails, There's another one that
you could be doing that the second option is to add a new domain to an
existing forest. Maybe there's already
a forest there. And there's already maybe
one or more domains that exist in your organization. But you want to create
a another domain. That's what you would do here. You would say, I want to
add a brand new domain, but it's part of
an existing forest that already exists
in the environment. Of course, in the
case of this demo, we're showing you how to
do this from scratch. So we're going to select,
Add a new forest, specify the domain information
for this operation. So what is the root domain name? What do you want this
domain to be called? Because now we get into the
configuration component, think about the
relevant domain name. Now this is a domain name
that should not be changed. Do not change your domain
once you've named it. So everything, every
computer you're going to have P co1.domain.com. So that domain is going to be
something that is for you. Could be Domain dot local, could be another
extension there as well. Give yourself a
relevant domain name. I'm doing this in a demo, so I'm going to call
it home demo.com. That is the domain that I'm
going to be giving out. Now this is completely different to domains
out on the Internet. If you're familiar
with, when you have to go and
configure a domain, the figure to www dot
Emilio Aguinaldo dotnet, which is my website e.g. well, that's a domain that
I went and registered. I went to accompany and
said I want that domain. And they gave me that
domain and then I've built a website and that's the
domain that it's sitting on. That's one thing. But this is now an
internal domain, a domain that is just for
you and for your business. It's not connected to the
external world at all. It can be, but it's not
connected in this time, in this case, to the
external Internet at all. It's completely internal. So we're gonna be calling
mine home demo.com. But of course you give
it your relevant name, make sure that you give
it a strong unique name, something that you will not
want to be changing later on. And then we click on next. We then go to an area here
called functional levels. Now what is a functional level? So let's say you've
got a pool of domain controllers and
they're all part of a domain. And the functional
level is 2016. Well, what this means is that your domain controller
that you're building, let's say you add a brand new domain controller to a domain. It needs to be on at least a functional
level of 2016 and upwards, it needs to be, which means it needs to be a
domain controller that is at least running
Windows Server 2016. If you go and build yourself a Windows Server 2008 or
a Windows Server 2012. And that is a domain controller. And you want to add a
2012 domain controller to a domain that he's running
Windows Server 2016 or higher. It will not work because the functional level
for your forest, of all for your domain. Remember that the forest
is the top-level domain sits within the forest. These are the
levels, the minimum levels that are available. If you're thinking
in the future, we'll look maybe
I do want to add some earlier versions
of Windows Server. Then maybe you want to say the functional
level of my forest. Maybe I want it to be
Windows Server 2008. So now I can actually get
a Windows Server 2008 or a server 2012 domain controller and add it to my
functional level. But then you also
lose some benefits that are going to be
coming with later versions of these functional levels. So if you're very
confident that 2016, every domain
controller you're ever going to build an add to this forest or domain is
going to be at least 2016, then you don't have
to worry about it. You could leave it as is
and let it do its thing. Now, specified domain controller cake capabilities is
a few things here. You can add this DNS,
which we've talked about. So it's going to add the DNS
and also a global catalog. The global catalog,
something that's gonna be used quite a fair bit. You're going to do lookups
of this global catalog. And it's gonna be
used by devices on your network to get names, to get authentication, all of that within your domain itself. So you want to make sure
that those two are ticked. Now, we type in that
directory services, Restore Mode password. This is a very
important password. In the event that in the future you need to do some
troubleshooting, you need to do some
restoration activities. This is a different
password to the password that we've set when you
configure your server, make this a very, very
strong secure password. Note it down somewhere, should only be known really
by domain administrators. And make it very, very strong
to go and put that one in. Do you wanna do any DNS
delegation with at the moment, we don't really have
anything set up. So I'm going to just
leave that as is. We're not gonna do
anything there, verify their net bios name. Now this isn't used
commonly as much anymore, but if you're using computers on your network
that are slightly older than maybe the net bios
time they want to be kept. And by default it's
found the net bios name, which is the same as my domain, which is home demo. We're happy with that.
Specify the location of your AD DS
database log files. And Cisco, very, very important that you know where these are
going to be going. These are gonna be needed
for you to do any. If you're gonna go into
advanced troubleshooting, if you want to do
any restoration. If you wanted to learn
around backups and restoring your actual
domain controller, needs to know where these are. Now, you can store these
locally on your own server to, on the server that
we're building. You can say, well, look,
store these files on here. It's not uncommon for servers to have multiple
disks potentially. And a disk could
be stored like it could be shared on
that server from a SAN or from an S. You could have some external
media connected to it. You may want to point these to a different location and have some separate backup set up. So I would recommend my personal recommendation
is you have your C Drive for all of
your main installation. But then perhaps you
have some separate D or E or F drives in there
that are mapped. How you're sharing
those is up to you whether that's from
a SAN or arenas. But then you store these
in a different path, in a different location. Make sure that you've
got relevant backups in place to back this
stuff up as well, because these files are gonna
be very, very important. So you can see a full summary
of what's going to happen. And the great thing is
you can actually see your script if you're big into PowerShell and you
wanna know well what's happening right here
behind the scenes. Let's view a script here. If you want to use PowerShell, then you can run that
command right there, throw it into
PowerShell, press Enter, and it'll do the same
thing as what we're doing here with the graphical
user interface. If you're happy
with all of that, we can click on Next
doing some prerequisites. So it's needing to
validate before AD is installed
on this computer. Now have a look at these. I would note these down. You don't have to
fix them right now. If there are any crosses,
big red crosses, then you're going
to have to go and fix those before you continue. But these are more advisory. So it's saying that a Windows Server 2022
domain controller have a default for the
security settings names. So it's essentially a vulnerability that's
been identified. Go and read up on
this KB article, familiarize yourself
with what's going on and frightened
and try to fix them. The second one is
around our DNS. So delegation with this DNS
can not be created because the authoritative parent zone cannot be found or does
not run Windows Server. And that's fine because
this is something completely brand new, but there's no action
required just yet. There's also a
notification saying that if you click on install, the server automatically
reboots at the end of the
promotion operation. If you're happy
with all of that, take note of these advisories, I'd maybe take a screenshot
or copy and paste this because you
can have to come back to it and have a look
at those at some point. But everything
else has passed or prerequisite checks have
passed successfully. So we can now click on install. Now you'll see that it says home demo, forward
slash administrative. So essentially identified
the domain itself, which is really nice. And if I go to other user, you may have seen this before. But down the very bottom
you'll see it says sign-in to and he says home demos
was actually identified, that it is part
of the domain and essentially the
domain controller is our first item that has added itself to a new
domain called home demo. So you could add the username
and password in here. But at the moment, of
course, we haven't even opened up Active Directory. We haven't configured any
users or anything like that. So let's just log back into the local administrator with the standard parser that
we set up previously. Now we've got a
domain controller now sit up and promoted. If we go into our start menu, we've now got an area under
Windows administrative tools. If I click on that, you'll see that there's
now additional software in their Active Directory
Admin Center domains and trusts modules for Windows
PowerShell is what it says. And sites and services
and users and computers. So you can open up
what's familiar to some people would be the
sinkhole users and computers. And this is essentially the home location where
you're gonna go and configure a whole bunch of
stuff specific to your domain. You will see that
it now says Active Directory Users and Computers. And it's part of this Windows, windows Server D
CO1 dot home demo.
5. It's now your turn: You should now know
what a domain is, what Active Directory is. You should now know how
to actually download your own copy of Windows Server, how to install it, and then how to
promote and install all the features to get a domain controller
up and running, and get Active Directory
up and running. So now it's your turn if you haven't already been
following along, go and read what some
of these videos. Then go and do this yourself
on your own computer, your laptop, your desktop, your server, in your home, in your work, in your
own lab environment. Let us know what
sort of environment you're gonna be doing this on. But then go and actually
set this up all yourself. So in the project section, let us know how you're doing. Go into find a domain defined
what Active Directory is. Let us know what the
differences are. Going download. You'll Windows Server yourself
off the internet, off the Microsoft website, completely free to use
for a 180 day trial. And then go and set up that
server that you've just installed as a
domain controller. And of course, because
it's domain controller, you're going to be
creating a domain and Active Directory along with it. So go and do that all yourself. Let us know, keep in touch, maybe take some photos
of your lab uploaded to your project and
then let us know as you are going through
each individual step. But that's it for this training class if you want to learn more about Active Directory now that you've built
your environment, I do have a whole dedicated
class on Active Directory, so you can go check
that out anyway. Thank you so much for
tuning in for this class. My name is Emilia, I love tech
and hopefully you do too, and we'll see you next time.
Emilio Aguero, ...all things tech
