Taras

Thank you for the advice everyone! Some very useful tips here that I will take with me. Since the original post I was able to setup a domain and have another VM join it, right now I am messing around with GPO and there's a lot of stuff to try out so it will take a while. Thanks! These are exactly the kinds of tasks I need, the ones where I have an objective but need to decide how to make it work myself.

Hello everyone, This is a question to those of you who's work revolves around Windows Server 2012. I apologize in advance if I am posting this in the wrong section, please move this thread if this is the case. I just want to get some general tips and pointers from those of you who are more experienced. Currently we use Windows Server 2012 R2 and SBS at work, there are about 30 users in total and in the last 2 years the only things that I ever had to do is setup new users and modify permissions. There really is not enough exposure to the server environment at work, I won't go into much details but basically I'm not allowed on the server unless it is to change someone's password or create a user. I just installed WS 2012 r2 VM on my PC at home, I know the basics of user setup & management as well as some other Active Directory stuff but that's where it ends for me. I'm not asking to teach me what you do, I'm just interested in the kind of advice that one IT professional would offer to another (who doesn't know much about WS). Right now I have a Win 8 VM and a Server VM running on my home machine. I will try to setup the Win 8 VM as a domain member, give it a couple of network drives and mess around with Group Policy. Any general advice as to what other kind of things I should try doing? Maybe someone can suggest some kind of a challenge for me to try overcome? Any kind of pointers would be of great help, it is not the "how to do x" that I want to hear, it is the "you should know and be able to do x if you want to be able to say that you know Windows Server well". Many thanks in advance! Taras