Administering Windows Server 2012 Case Studies & Practical Application 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A company migrates from a workgroup to a domain environment. Users report they must enter credentials every time they access network shares. Which setting resolves this for domain-joined machines?
- Enable Credential Manager on each PC
- Join workstations to the domain and log on with domain credentials (Correct answer)
- Configure Kerberos pre-authentication manually
- Create local accounts matching domain usernames
Correct answer: Join workstations to the domain and log on with domain credentials
Joining workstations to the domain allows Kerberos SSO so users authenticate once at logon and access resources without re-entering credentials.
Question 2: An administrator configured a Windows Server 2012 DNS server with a new forward lookup zone but clients still resolve to the old IP. Which action should the administrator take first?
- Restart the DNS Client service on all workstations
- Flush the DNS cache on the server using dnscmd /clearcache (Correct answer)
- Increase the zone TTL to force immediate propagation
- Recreate the zone as an Active Directory-integrated zone
Correct answer: Flush the DNS cache on the server using dnscmd /clearcache
Clearing the server's DNS resolver cache forces it to serve fresh records rather than cached stale responses.
Question 3: A Hyper-V host is running at 95% CPU. Investigation shows one VM is consuming most of the CPU. You need to limit that VM's CPU impact without shutting it down. What should you configure?
- Increase the number of virtual processors for the VM
- Set a Virtual Machine Reserve on the VM
- Configure a CPU Maximum on the VM via Hyper-V settings (Correct answer)
- Enable NUMA spanning for the VM
Correct answer: Configure a CPU Maximum on the VM via Hyper-V settings
Setting a CPU Maximum in Hyper-V limits the percentage of host CPU cycles a virtual machine can use, preventing it from starving other VMs.
Question 4: During a DR test, an administrator tries to restore a Server 2012 system state backup to a different server. The restore fails with a hardware mismatch error. What is the best resolution?
- Use Windows Server Backup with the --norollforward option
- Perform a bare-metal restore using Windows Recovery Environment (Correct answer)
- Restore only the Active Directory database using ntdsutil
- Use wbadmin with the -quiet switch to bypass hardware checks
Correct answer: Perform a bare-metal restore using Windows Recovery Environment
A bare-metal restore via Windows RE handles driver and hardware abstraction, making recovery to dissimilar hardware more reliable.
Question 5: Users report that a shared network printer is available in Active Directory but jobs sent to it never print. The print server shows jobs completing successfully. What should you check first?
- Whether the printer driver is installed on client machines
- The spooler service status on the print server
- Whether the printer is set to offline mode on the device itself (Correct answer)
- Whether the GPO deploying the printer is linked to the correct OU
Correct answer: Whether the printer is set to offline mode on the device itself
If the device itself is set to offline or powered off, jobs appear to complete in the spooler but are never sent to the printer.
Question 6: A Windows Server 2012 file server hosts home folders for 500 users. Storage is growing rapidly. Which built-in feature can reclaim space by eliminating duplicate data without affecting user access?
- NTFS compression
- Data Deduplication (Correct answer)
- Storage Spaces tiering
- Shadow Copies
Correct answer: Data Deduplication
Data Deduplication identifies and removes redundant data chunks on NTFS volumes transparently, with no change to how users access files.
Question 7: An administrator needs to deploy a Windows Server 2012 R2 image to 200 bare-metal servers simultaneously over the network. Which service is designed for this scenario?
- Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) standalone
- Windows Deployment Services (WDS) (Correct answer)
- System Center Configuration Manager OSD
- Remote Desktop Services per-user CAL deployment
Correct answer: Windows Deployment Services (WDS)
WDS is a Windows Server role that enables PXE-based network booting and multicast image deployment to multiple machines simultaneously.
Administering Windows Server 2012 Case Studies & Practical Application 3
A company migrates from a workgroup to a domain environment.
Users report they must enter credentials every time they access network shares.
Which setting resolves this for domain-joined machines?