Installing Windows Server 2022 & Active Directory Domain Services
Installing Windows Server 2022
To start, I installed Microsoft’s Windows Server 2022 ISO from their evaluation center: Windows Server 2022 | Microsoft Evaluation Center.
After installing I opened up VMware, created a new Windows Server VM using the installed ISO. The OS I chose to install was the “Standard Evaluation [Desktop Experience]” because I wanted a full GUI:
I went through the typical Windows OS installation process, created a new Administrator password:
After logging in for the first time, the Server Manager opens automatically:
Installing Active Directory Domain Services
From the Server Manager, I needed to select “Add roles and features”:
After doing so, a wizard pops up and I selected “Role-based or feature-based installation”:
In server selection, there likely would be more servers to choose from in the Server Pool if I was on a bigger network, but in this case, it’s just my server:
For Server Roles we are selecting “Active Directory Domain Services” (AD DS), and to do so we also are required to install other role services or features, which can easily be installed by clicking “Add Features”:
Since I only wanted to install the one role in the previous section, I’m just selecting “Next” and not installing any additional features:
I selected for the destination server to restart automatically if it is required since no real users will be using this server, so there won’t be any negative impact due to the server restarting randomly:
Finally, I clicked install to install the AD Domain Services:
Promoting Server to Domain Controller
After the features installation, we are still not done. We still need to make our domain a domain controller by promoting it:
Because we don’t have an existing domain, or forest, we have to add a new forest:
Functional levels were technically discontinued, so Server 2016 is selected by default. But hypothetically if we had another domain running Server 2016 or later, we would need to select the correct functional levels so communications between this server and the older ones can occur.
Forgot to highlight it, but DNS was selected as a domain controller capability as a best practice:
The default NetBIOS domain name was selected automatically, and I left it:
Left the paths of AD DS DB, log files, and SYSVOL to be default even though in a real setting having these on separate drives would be much better:
Nothing to select, I clicked “Next”:
Clicked “Install” after prerequisites check was successful:
After installing, my VM was required to restart to finish installation. The Domain Services, DNS, and File and Storage Services were successfully installed. Don’t need to worry about the since services just naturally take a minute to start up after a reboot:
From this project, I was able to:
- Install Windows Server 2022
- Install and configure Active Directory Domain Services
- Promote Active Directory Domain Services to a Domain Controller
