What a Windows Server administrator really does

On a real server, the first five minutes of any ticket look the same: who am I, what is this machine, how much memory and disk does it have, is it on the network, and are its services healthy? You’ll run that exact check now, on your own laptop. Windows 11 and Windows Server 2025 share the same core, so every command here works the same way on a server.

None of these commands change anything. Your numbers and names will be different from the examples, and that’s expected.

1Open PowerShell and check who you are

Press the Windows key, type PowerShell and open Windows PowerShell. Don’t choose “Run as administrator” yet; you’ll see why in the Break It lab.

Run this:

whoami
hostname

You should see something like this:

PS C:\Users\ravi> whoami
laptop-ravi\ravi
PS C:\Users\ravi> hostname
LAPTOP-RAVI

whoami shows the account you’re using, in the form computer\user. On a company laptop it would say domain\user instead, because the account lives in Active Directory. hostname is the computer’s name; on servers, admins check both before changing anything, so they don’t fix the wrong machine.

✅ Checkpoint: You can see your user name and your computer name.

2Check the operating system and when it last started

Run this:

Get-CimInstance Win32_OperatingSystem | Select-Object Caption, Version, LastBootUpTime

You should see something like this:

Caption                  Version    LastBootUpTime
-------                  -------    --------------
Microsoft Windows 11 Pro 10.0.26100 14-10-2026 09:12:44

Get-CimInstance asks Windows for management information, and the | pipe passes the result to Select-Object, which keeps only the columns you want. Build 26100 is the same core that Windows Server 2025 uses.

LastBootUpTime tells you how long the machine has been running. When a server “suddenly” misbehaves, this is one of the first things to check: did it just reboot after updates, or has it been running for 200 days without a patch?

✅ Checkpoint: You can see your Windows version and the date and time your laptop last started.

3Check memory and virtualization support

Run these one at a time:

Get-CimInstance Win32_ComputerSystem | Select-Object @{n='RAM_GB';e={[math]::Round($_.TotalPhysicalMemory/1GB)}}, NumberOfLogicalProcessors
Get-CimInstance Win32_Processor | Select-Object Name, VirtualizationFirmwareEnabled

You should see something like this:

RAM_GB NumberOfLogicalProcessors
------ -------------------------
    16                         8

Name                                           VirtualizationFirmwareEnabled
----                                           -----------------------------
11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1135G7 @ 2.40GHz                          True

The first command rounds the memory to whole gigabytes. The @{n=...;e={...}} part makes a new column with your own name and a small calculation; you’ll use this trick often. The second command shows if the processor’s virtualization feature (Intel VT-x or AMD-V) is turned on in the BIOS, which VirtualBox needs to run 64-bit servers.

✅ Checkpoint: RAM_GB is 8 or more, and VirtualizationFirmwareEnabled says True. If it says False, see the troubleshooting table below before you worry.

4Check disk space

Run this:

Get-Volume -DriveLetter C | Select-Object DriveLetter, @{n='SizeGB';e={[math]::Round($_.Size/1GB)}}, @{n='FreeGB';e={[math]::Round($_.SizeRemaining/1GB)}}

You should see something like this:

DriveLetter SizeGB FreeGB
----------- ------ ------
          C    476    182

A full disk is one of the most common reasons a server stops working: logs can’t be written, updates fail and databases stop. On servers, admins usually set an alert at 85 or 90 percent full. For the course lab you need about 80 GB free on any drive.

✅ Checkpoint: FreeGB is 80 or more on C: or another drive. To check another drive, change the letter after -DriveLetter.

5Check the network

Run this:

Get-NetIPAddress -AddressFamily IPv4 | Select-Object InterfaceAlias, IPAddress, PrefixOrigin

You should see something like this:

InterfaceAlias              IPAddress    PrefixOrigin
--------------              ---------    ------------
Wi-Fi                       192.168.1.34         Dhcp
Loopback Pseudo-Interface 1 127.0.0.1       WellKnown

Look at PrefixOrigin. Dhcp means a DHCP server gave your laptop this address; at home, that’s your Wi-Fi router. Servers are different: they get fixed addresses typed in by hand, which shows as Manual.

In Lesson 6 you’ll give your lab servers fixed addresses, and in Lesson 15 you’ll build the DHCP server that hands out addresses to everything else.

✅ Checkpoint: You can see your Wi-Fi or Ethernet adapter with an IP address, and you know where that address came from.

6Check services and recent errors

Run these one at a time:

Get-Service -Name Dnscache, Spooler, W32Time
Get-WinEvent -FilterHashtable @{LogName='System'; Level=2} -MaxEvents 3 | Select-Object TimeCreated, Id, ProviderName

You should see something like this:

Status   Name               DisplayName
------   ----               -----------
Running  Dnscache           DNS Client
Running  Spooler            Print Spooler
Stopped  W32Time            Windows Time

TimeCreated            Id ProviderName
-----------            -- ------------
18-10-2026 21:04:10 10016 Microsoft-Windows-DistributedCOM
17-10-2026 08:51:33  7000 Service Control Manager
16-10-2026 19:22:05 10016 Microsoft-Windows-DistributedCOM

Get-Service shows if a service is running. The DNS Client and Print Spooler are running, and Windows Time is stopped, which is normal on a home laptop because it starts only when needed. On a domain controller, a stopped Windows Time service would be serious: Kerberos sign-in breaks when clocks drift more than five minutes apart.

Get-WinEvent reads the event log, and Level=2 means errors only. Event 10016 from DistributedCOM is a well-known harmless error that Microsoft says you can ignore. That’s the first rule of reading logs: not every red line is your problem, so check what an event means before you act on it.

✅ Checkpoint: You can see the state of three services and the three most recent errors in your System log. If you get “No events were found”, your laptop has no recent errors, which is good news.

Is your laptop ready for the lab? Compare your results with this table:

If you meet all four, you’re ready for Lesson 2. With only 8 GB of RAM you can still do almost every lab; you’ll use Server Core VMs, which need less memory.