Building your first Server Core

Perhaps the most important way to increase security in your organization is to lower the security threshold, or footprint, of your servers and infrastructure. In other words, if there are any services running or ports open on your servers that aren't actually being used purposefully, you should disable or turn that particular service off. Now, hardening a Windows Server by disabling services and uninstalling things isn't an easy job; you can quickly turn something off that is important to the operating system and cause all kinds of problems on that server. Thankfully, there is a much safer and more secure way to harden your servers, but it requires planning from the beginning of your server build.

Server Core is a version of Windows Server 2016 that is essentially a headless operating system; all of your interaction with it is either command-line driven or done remotely from other servers or systems. Server Core is an alternate installation method to the full...