Installing roles and features

Installing the operating system itself gets your foot in the door, so to speak, using your server as a server. However, you can't actually do anything useful with your server at this point. On a client desktop system, the base operating system is generally all that is needed in order to start working and consuming data. The server's job is to serve up that data in the first place, and until you tell the server what its purpose is in life, there really isn't anything useful happening in that base operating system. This is where we need to utilize roles and features. Windows Server 2016 contains many different options for roles.

A role is just what the name implies, the installation of a particular role onto a server defines that server's role in the network. In other words, a role gives a server some purpose in life. A feature, on the other hand, is more of a subset of functions that you can install onto a server. Features can complement...