CompTIA Server+ (SK0-005)

For IT leaders: Many sysadmins move into server roles from networking or help desk work. Without a common foundation, teams end up with inconsistent builds, weak hardening, and backup plans that lack defined recovery objectives. All of these raise outage and audit risk.

Role fit: This course suits IT practitioners with about a year of server experience, newly hired systems administrators, and experienced admins who want to validate their skills with the Server+ (SK0-005) certification. Team Leads can use it as a shared onboarding baseline across both Windows and Linux environments.

Risk and compliance relevance: The course covers data security and regulatory drivers, server licensing considerations, post-deployment hardening, server decommissioning practices, and backup planning built around RPO.

Time investment: The course runs about 25.5 hours across 24 skills of roughly one hour each. That length fits weekly assignments of one or two skills without pulling staff off production work.

Change-management note: The troubleshooting content can support a more consistent remediation process by giving admins a shared way to approach server issues before making production changes. Team Leads should map those lessons to the organization’s existing change-control requirements where production systems are involved.

How CBT Nuggets supports the outcome: The training is organized as a sequenced playlist with hands-on demonstrations, including VM deployment and Linux CLI work. Training Managers can assign it end to end or pull targeted skills, such as RAID or disaster recovery, for specific roles.

How this training helps your team succeed in the real world

Server work quickly becomes overwhelming for IT Practitioners who come from networking or help desk roles. Racking, power, storage, identity, and recovery all land on them at once. This course gives IT teams a shared, practical foundation for keeping servers available, secure, and recoverable.

• Faster, calmer outage response: Your team learns a structured troubleshooting method. They identify the real root cause, such as a wiped group policy or a network change, before acting. They build a plan with clear owners, approvals, and a rollback path, then use snapshots to return to a last known good state.
• Recovery targets tied to business needs: Team Leads can turn objectives like a 6-hour Recovery Point Objective (RPO) into backup schedules. They also learn how high availability and disaster recovery keep websites and databases online after a failure.
• Stronger security posture at deployment: Admins learn to harden servers before services go live, through physical controls, OS hardening, built-in firewalls and antivirus, and patching. They also learn how network segmentation can help separate and control server traffic.
• Confidence across hybrid environments: Practitioners build virtual machines and manage them remotely over SSH. They work through Linux command-line basics and plan hybrid designs, including how on-premises systems and public cloud resources can support backup and recovery strategies.

Knowledge

• What servers do and how modern multi-tier web apps exchange JSON payloads with HTTP endpoints, with redundancy designed in
• Server racking, cabling, internal components, storage, and RAID options, plus OS installation methods such as attended installs
• Virtualization fundamentals, including virtualized storage and networking, CPU and RAM over-provisioning, and private, public, and hybrid cloud deployment patterns
• Data security drivers, identity and access management with Active Directory and domains, network segmentation, and server hardening steps
• Backup, restore, high availability, and disaster recovery concepts, including how a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) dictates backup frequency
• Server licensing considerations and secure decommissioning techniques

Ability

• Deploy a virtual machine from an ISO and enable SSH for remote management
• Work in the Linux command line to create, edit, read, and organize files and directories
• Harden a newly deployed server through physical controls, OS updates, and built-in antivirus and firewall features before rolling out services
• Apply a structured troubleshooting methodology: identify the root cause, then plan the fix with owners, approvals, and a rollback plan
• Troubleshoot OS, hardware, security, file-permission, and networking issues with a structured, evidence-based process
• Use recovery disks and snapshots to roll back to a last known good state