Windows Server

You're probably familiar with Microsoft Windows as a workstation, that is the version that's put on laptops and desktops, because it's so prevalent out there. But there is a Windows server, and it looks a little different. There are a lot of similar aspects between the two, but let's discuss what some of the similarities and differences are between a Windows workstation and a Windows server.

What a server is designed to do

Really, what a server is, is designed to handle a lot of different clients and provide services for clients. Here we have a workstation right here, so we call this the client, and the client has some sort of app on it. And then we have a server, and the server provides services. That's really the design of it, is to provide services for those apps or for those end users. An example might be DHCP or web services.

So let's look at services. The app on a client machine would be a browser like Google Chrome or Firefox or Edge, and the app over here on this side might be Apache or could be IIS. Whatever it is, this server runs it so that way it can deliver web pages to that app. That's the client-server relationship. There are specific hardwares designed to be servers, there are specific OSes that are designed as servers, and then there is the service itself that's providing services.

The same kernel, a similar look and feel

The base code of the kernel of a Microsoft server is the same kernel as you would see in one of its workstations. So Windows 11 has the same NT operating system kernel, or ntoskrnl. Some elements in the user mode have changed on the front end here, but not a lot, and so we see a lot of similarities between what a server is and what a regular desktop or laptop would look like.

It's not surprising, then, that the Windows workstation and what you're seeing right here, which is the Windows server, have a very similar look and feel. In fact, this Windows server has a very similar look and feel to Windows 10, which is one of the older workstations. So as we look through here, we see a lot of similarities.

What is different

So what are some of the differences? The first thing I'm going to do is click the Start button. What will happen is that the Start button appears, and it appears a little differently: rather than it gradually opening up, it more just kind of appears there, and we see that the edges here are much more square. Same thing if we open up a window here with File Explorer, we see that the edges are square. Now, this is not really a big deal, but it just feels a little less polished than like a Windows 11 machine.

Really there's a lot less eye candy, a lot less of the kind of components that make it really feel like a polished workstation. Rather, it feels more kind of institutional when you open things up. There's less things like it fading in, or the windows being kind of see-through; versus the newer workstations, you can kind of see through the windows. That kind of stuff is taken off, and the reason why is that it's really built more for performance.

One aspect where we can see this is if we open up Services. This is showing us some of the stuff that's running on our machine that's set up as a service, so it can run on the machine. As we look through this list, if we were to compare this to a Windows workstation, we would see that there are some differences. There will be a lot of similarities; for instance, this has a DHCP client on it, and so does the workstation. So there's going to be a lot of similarities, but there are going to be some services that are removed for this server and other services that are added.

We can also see that with the different programs. I'm going to close out of this and go to our Start menu, and we see that what's added here is very basic as far as the programs are concerned. One of the things that's added here is the Server Manager, so if we open this up, it has a lot of different features that we wouldn't see on a typical workstation.

Server roles

What I'm going to do is close this window right here and go to my local server, to take a look at my local server. We can see that it's just a dashboard here, that I can manage different aspects of this server here. So I'm going to click on this Manage right here and go to Add Roles and Features. With Add Roles and Features, now it shows me a wizard that I can step through, and what I want to get to is the different server roles. These are things that I could install on this server. I see things like a DNS server, DHCP server. These are not options really on a workstation.

I could actually turn a workstation into a DHCP server, into a DNS server. I could install services on a workstation that would allow me to turn it into these things right here, but it's not set up by default where I can just select a few things and install it automatically. I would have to jump through some extra hoops to actually get it set up and running on a workstation, versus this server where it's right at my fingertips. I can say, well, I want a DHCP server, and then go through the process of installing that DHCP server.

There are things on the back end that we can't necessarily see that are different on this server, like the amount of connections it can handle. So there are some other differences that aren't visual, that I can't just point out, that are more license based, of being able to have some limitations on a workstation that aren't here on the server.

But there again, there are a lot of similarities. Things like the taskbar are laid out very similarly, and the windows structure: if I were to go into here, this has a lot of the same files and folders and the same way it manages things. So those are a lot of the things that are going to be very similar between this server and a workstation.