Windows Administration
This was a ten week course (IT278) built around Windows Server 2016, though most of the labs also traced how each feature carried forward into Server 2022 and 2025. The arc ran from server editions and deployment options through storage, containers, Hyper-V virtualization, and finally high availability and disaster recovery. As a working Windows sysadmin, a lot of this formalized things I already do day to day, but it filled in the gaps around the enterprise features I do not touch as often.
What the course covered
The early weeks set the foundation: comparing Server 2012 R2 to 2016 and to Ubuntu Server, walking through the minimum hardware and the lighter install options like Server Core and Nano Server, and covering deployment imaging with DISM, Sysprep, and Windows PE. There was also a practical unit on system administrator best practices, ticketing, prioritization, change management, and handling mistakes honestly, plus an ethics piece that used the Equifax breach to show how a missed patch and dishonest internal reporting compound into a disaster.
The middle stretch was containers, which was familiar ground. I run containers for a media server and DNS at home and my team uses them for AppSec scanning at work, so digging into the Windows side was useful. I learned that container networking is actually handled by the Host Network Service rather than Docker itself, which is why the Docker CLI and PowerShell return the same data, and I worked through the NAT, transparent, and l2bridge drivers.
The back half was Hyper-V and clustering: installing the role, managing VMs, live and storage migration, virtual switches and offload features like VMQ and SR-IOV, then failover clustering, quorum and witness options, Scale-Out File Server, Storage Spaces Direct, and Network Load Balancing. The final labs tied these into a layered business continuity and disaster recovery design.
What I took from it
The clustering and DR material was the most valuable because it is the part I have the least hands-on exposure to. Understanding how failover clustering, Hyper-V Replica, and NLB stack together, and where each one stops, gave me a clearer picture of how the enterprise HA pieces fit that I only saw fragments of before.