Learn about Workgroup vs Domain for new IT Professionals

In this module, we will work on workgroup versus domain in our Active Directory and group policy management course. Now, why do we need to know about workgroup and domain? What is the reason behind this? The reason behind this, we need to know both because when you get a computer from, let's say, Dell or Lenovo or HP, you don't get it managed, right? They don't send you a machine that is already managed by them. They just send you a fresh machine. They may install an operating system for you and you have to configure it then, or they may not do that. They may just send you some type of ISO file or a USB or some type of media that you can put that operating system on. So at that moment, that computer is on workgroup. So you do need to know how to change it from workgroup to domain because you want to now make it more managed. So let's go to our PowerPoint just to get some more understanding. Number one is workgroup. Number two is domain. So you can see workgroup, there is no server required. Now, let me give you a very basic example for workgroup. You go to Best Buy, you buy your laptop. So when you buy your laptop, you bring it home. Then you have, let's say, a router somewhere inside your home. And then, let's say, you go to your room and you open the laptop and you get connected to this router, basically. Now, you can see that there was nothing in the middle. You didn't need any other management server or nothing. You just got connected because you knew the password, number one. And you were able to get into this machine because you have created your own admin and user and password or you could be a guest on that machine. But you just got into that machine because you knew the username and password. It was given to you and you could only get into this machine. So now, imagine, let's say, someone in your house tried to get into your machine. They just get into your room. They want to get into your machine. They won't be able to do that unless they break into it, which is a different thing. But they won't be able to basically log into any account because they don't know the account. Even if they see the account username, they won't be able to use any other information like password because you have the password. So even if they do like a switch user, maybe other user or something like that, they won't be able to log in even if they have one account on their machine. Let's say, they have another laptop over here. So they may have a username and password as well. They may be connected to the same router. But they have a separate username and password to get into their machine. They cannot get into yours. You cannot get into theirs. So now, make this like a company now. Let's say, you're working for a company and they didn't have any management. So they may have one machine over here and multiply that with 20 more machines. So imagine, everybody will need their own account to get into their machines. So now, if they had an issue, you need to go and help them. You need to know their username and password. They may even forget it. Now, that's even more problem right there. So then of course, then you need to manage these machines, all 20 machines. You won't be able to do that easily because you need some type of management server in between so you can get into these machines with just one single account. That won't work. So there's a lot of issues in this area for business type of environment. This may work for home because you don't need servers in the home. You do need your own privacy. Yes, this is a great option for the home. And I will show you how you can verify this stuff later on in this video. But this is a clear, simple example, not too technical example. That's how people will define workgroup. Then if you come to the domain side of it, this is how the companies are using networks. So they get the same machine right here in this example. But now in the middle, they will have something like domain controller. And that is where Active Directory will play a very big role because you can see user accounts are stored in Active Directory. And then that server is basically, Active Directory is installed inside that server operating system. So now this is like a king inside your network because all of these machines are connected to it through network. And if you are the admin over here, you can basically manage your machines from that single account. So this person having an issue, this person may be, let's say, locked out. So you can, from here, you log into your machine, somehow get connected to the Active Directory, which you're going to learn later on how to manage Active Directory from your machine. And then you basically unlock this person. This person may be saying that I cannot even get into my machine. Maybe this is dropped from the network. So still you can come back and troubleshoot this type of issues. Or this person may say, I need to access a, let's say, a folder on the network. Now everything is connected. So then those permissions and everything like that becomes very easy. And you can simply give this person an access to a folder on a network. And then this person will get in with no issues. This person may say, I need a software. Can you give me a software? So now if you're the admin over here, you can deploy the software by using your softwares easily because you're in the network. You have the access. You can do basically almost everything to help these user out. And that would be the big difference between these two, why people would prefer this in a company environment when they're even small, medium, large, depending on what their requirements are. Not everybody uses Active Directory, but most of the people in IT knows about Active Directory. Probably 98% of the IT professional will probably know this. And this is why you need to learn the skill so you can impress people. Now let's get into a little bit more official type of understanding. So you can see if you click on the workgroup, you see this is a peer network workgroup. So this could be a hub, a Wi-Fi inside your home network, or any, let's say, lab environment. You go to the business, and they may have a lab that is just connected to the switch. And then it's not joined to any servers. You're just managing them as a group. So if you look at the example of Active Directory, right here, it basically is a client server. A lot of people also use, when we talk about Active Directory or domain network, they may also use client server network. Has client's workstation as well as server or many servers. As you can see in the figure, the clients are labeled Computer A, B, Laptop A, and so on. There's also a file server and a directory server which is used to manage user accounts. So in other words, you have some type of switch right here. Inside that switch, you see that there's a server that has a lot of users. So that could be your AD, which is Active Directory installed on this. This could be a domain controller as well. Then there's another server connected to Active Directory. It's joined to this network. But this is serving files to this computer. Because of this guy right here, because of the access, because of the management, people can get into these files very, very easily. And if this was you right here, you would be able to manage everybody from your machine in this network with no issue at all. Okay. So now if we move on to the official understanding of what is Active Directory, if people ask you, it is a directory service available with the Windows Server Platform. So when we talk about Active Directory, we're talking about Windows Server Platform. We're talking about Linux over here. AD, Active Directory, that's Windows right there. It stores information in credential database and central database and allow users to have a single user account called a domain user account. Remember, whenever you add a user inside Active Directory, which you will later on find out practical, and when we add a user in Active Directory, that user is a, by default, a domain user account. Now you can then give it more rights, becoming more a domain admin, enterprise admin, stuff like that. But the user account is called domain user account. Just know this because people may ask you in the interview, and this would be your official way to explain this. But you can also say that Active Directory is a management, a client server management, where you can manage other machines inside your business. You can give a very normal type of answer when it comes to stuff like that. There's no official answer into this that you have to really talk about the way it is in here. But it's good to have some little bit of explanation like it's a central database and allow users to have a single user account called domain user. So if you see that, I think that's a good and solid answer. Okay. So now moving on, inside the company, how does it work when we have an Active Directory? So just let's do a little bit of visual understanding. So if you come over here, you see this is our image right here. Now this is coming from testout.com when we give this type of access in our live training, but here I'm using this image just so people can have a better understanding. So you can see right here, this is an executive office right here, and then we have this IT administration team. So these guys are going to be mostly coming over here and adding that server. So this could be a data center right here. And in here there will be this, let's say for example, there's a server right here and that's AD right here. We have installed AD, either a physical server or a virtual server, that doesn't matter. Most likely a lot of people are using virtual server and they put Windows Server on it and then they install Active Directory domain services on that server. So now you see that. If you are sitting here, first of all, your computer through the network somehow going to the jack, wall, whatever, and coming over here and then you get connected to the network, to that computer. That computer is then joined to this Active Directory and now you basically have a management computer. So usually you have access, you have more access than other users. That is why people will make you help this because then you can help these people right here. So let's say for example, in Office 2, this is our accounting person. This person locked themselves out because they were trying it multiple times. So then what will happen? You're not going to go walk out there to unlock them. You're just going to go to your computer right here and go to the Active Directory through the management tools and then you will unlock this person through the network. This is what we call a managed environment. Because if this was a work group computer, it was no Active Directory in the middle, let's say, you can use some other way to get into that, but most likely you would have just walked in there and then fixed it. What if this is like so many other people? Of course, even if this was on a network and there was no centralized management, still it's a painful job. It doesn't have to be just walking in there. It's very painful job than if you don't have some type of management going on. And there's other benefits that management gives you too, which you will find out later on. But for now, just understand that this is how we use Active Directory to make our life very, very easy. Now moving on, we're going to go into a little bit of a realistic example of how do you determine which one is Active Directory and how do people actually test you in this stuff. So here I'm going to log into our server and after this video, you're going to find out how to set up your Active Directory lab in your own virtual box for free or you can use our servers and later you can use your premium access labs if you want to use that. In this lab example, which you will configure this after this section, for now, just kind of for this specific video purpose to understand this stuff clearly, this is a domain controller right here. We have a domain controller. Then this is a machine that is joined to this domain controller. So let's go ahead and first open our domain controller. When we say Active Directory, what are we talking about? Usually when you go to the company, they will have a server already running by the systems administrators. You don't really touch that server. Now when you log into an actual domain controller inside your company, like I mentioned, it could be a virtual machine, which most of the companies these days are going to have it like this exactly. They're going to be using some type of virtualization like VMware, Hyper-V. Now if I'm talking about virtualization and you don't know what I'm talking about, you definitely need to go back to your learning path and finish your first and second course, which is very important in this case because you're going to be missing a lot of skills because in this course, we are not going to talk about extreme basics. This is the stuff that we have already covered. So now if you come to your domain controller, usually you'll go to start and I'm going to make it very simple for now. You can always do this stuff in a more advanced way, but the normal way is click on start, go to the server manager, and then here in this server, you're going to see something different than other servers. Now when you open a normal server inside your network, it's not going to have some of the features that this server will have. So for example, if I open the server, you can see it has this ADDS. Basically that is what makes this a domain controller. So where does it come from? So when you install the server fresh operating system like 2019, 12, 16, and you open the add roles and features and you click on next, next, and of course this is not just next, next, next for many people. This is something that a sysadmin will be doing extensive research before they implement something like this. But the problem is that a lot of people when they land a job as a helpdesk, they don't see this stuff and you directly work on Active Directory. So when you miss this stuff, you don't know how this thing, this how they created this, your learning becomes pretty harder in the future. You may get some of the things, but you just don't know where it's coming from. So right now a sysadmin will go over here, they will just click on Active Directory domain services and they will configure some of the other stuff, DNS and everything else. They'll just click next, next, next, next. When they finish everything, the machine will restart and then they will see something like Active Directory users and computers. Now this is what we were talking about in our lecture. We found out that from here you can manage other machines. Now what are the other machines? In this case, let's say for example, if this helpdesk DH is a my helpdesk person and you know, he or she is sitting somewhere in the office. So let's say for example, I open this machine right now and I open it like that. Now if I just totally open my fresh laptop or desktop, I'll have to install the operating systems and then I will have to then tell this machine to connect to this Active Directory because I know certain skills which you're going to learn in our course. So basically when you join this computer, what you're doing is you're managing these machines from here. So when people join these machines, they will automatically show up in this computer's folder container. This is a container. These are all used. But of course, later on you will find everything about this stuff and you know, I just want to make sure that people understand that when we talk about domain join management, this is where things are getting managed now. So now if this machine is already joined, I can do certain things to this machine and to take control over it. For example, if anybody wants to be logging into that machine, let's say I have two users. One is working in the morning. One is working in the evening. I can create two accounts. So the first user will log in in the morning. The second one will log in in the evening. Still, I will be able to manage both of these users from a single point. If two users need something, I can definitely manage them. If one user is basically leaving and I am now thinking maybe this person shouldn't get to my computer at evening, I can just log into this machine from anywhere and I can lock that person out. So I can right click over here and I can say, okay, you know what, I'm just going to reset the password for this person so then he or she can now log in. I can do multiple other things with this specific user. I can add certain things to these users. For example, I can say, you know what, I'm just going to give this person rights so then this only one user can install software for themselves but the other user shouldn't do that. So you see this is the management that we're talking about over here. If I don't have something like this, then of course if I have a brand new machine, I cannot manage it till this machine is on the domain. So for example, this is a brand new machine right here and you can see this machine is not configured. So if I have to configure it, I have to go on to that machine and I have to first do my initial configuration and if I turn this on at the basic level and don't do anything, I don't manage or I don't join this to the domain, then this becomes a work group computer and for now the only way for me to manage this is to log into this locally and then I will have to create this account over here now and that is the only account I will be able to do things but I will not be able to use my help this account over here which is more powerful account but this is not going to work because it's not joined to the domain. I hope this lab, this information, this different type of explanation have cleared some of the differences between work group and domain but again, this is just a start. After this, we are going to build an exact same lab that you're seeing right now in our server, JSS servers and of course, you can use the virtual box to do the same stuff and then you will be able to see the almost the same in your own lab if you want, if you prefer that and everything will be done hands-on after this. Thank you and I'll see you in a different module.