Installation of older versions of SharePoint is agnostic of role. It’s the services that farm admins provision that determines the server role. E.g. on a search server, farm admins provision Search Service and the related services. Similarly different set of services are provisioned on an application server and front-end server.
SharePoint 2016 introduces a concept called MinRole, aka. Server Roles, which is designed to transform guidance to code. This concept helps in implementing best practices for optimizing performance for the role type. MinRole/Server Role can be configured both by using powershell (PSConfig) and the gui (PSConfigUI)
[…] This feature allows selecting a role for SharePoint server at the time installation. Selecting a role optimizes the SharePoint for that role. SharePoint 2016 also lets us check running services and if they are compliant with the MinRole. You can read more on MinRole in my blog post: https://www.webagesolutions.com/blog/archives/1522 […]