Windows Server 2012 R2, Already??

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Last June we announced a new version of our server OS. Windows Server 2012 R2 which by the way, is available for download now. It’s at the heart of our Cloud OS vision and it can bring unprecedented scale to you infrastructure. I am amazed at how much innovation we packed into this releases – especially in such a short time.

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There is a truly amazing amount new value in Windows Server 2012 R2 and, with this in mind, we want to help jump-start your understanding of the key scenarios that we are enabling.

Those scenarios are based on three pillars

Pillar

Scenarios

Empower People-centric IT

People-centric IT (PCIT) empowers each person you support to work virtually anywhere on PCs and devices of their choice, while providing IT with an easy, consistent, and secure way to manage it all. Microsoft's approach helps IT offer a consistent self-service experience for people, their PCs, and their devices while ensuring security. You can manage all your client devices in a single tool while reducing costs and simplifying management.

Transform the Datacenter

Transforming the datacenter means driving your business with the power of a hybrid cloud infrastructure. Our goal is to help you leverage your investments, skills and people by providing a consistent datacenter and public cloud services platform, as well as products and technologies that work across your datacenter, and service provider clouds.

Enable Modern Business Apps

Modern business apps live and move wherever you want, and Microsoft offers the tools and resources that deliver industry-leading performance, high availability, and security. This means boosting the impact of both new and existing applications, and easily extending applications with new capabilities – including deploying across multiple devices.

Has Brad Anderson, Corporate Vice President, Windows Server & System Center, mentioned in his blog we will examine in great detail those three core pillars in the upcoming weeks.

However here are some of the new features that support these pillars: (just to wet your appetite).

Live migration compression: Compresses virtual machine during live migration to improve migration speed.

Hyper-v Replica:   Hyper-V Replica provides a cost-effective way for SMBs to implement disaster recovery/business continuity scenarios. Extended replication, now add a second replica to add extra protection for your VM at offsite location or hoster. Finer grained control of replication, now choose 30 sec interval or 5 minutes (default) For other scenarios choose 15 minutes.  Windows Azure will support orchestration of recovery using Hyper-V DR replica’s and system center VMM on premise.

Dynamic memory for Linux guests: Automatically reallocates memory between virtual machines that are running Linux as a guest OS on a Hyper-V host.

Online VHDX resize: Online VHDX resize allows a virtual SCSI disk to either grow or shrink the VHDX file whilst attached to a running virtual machine.

Storage tiering: Storage Spaces has been enhanced with the capability to pool a combination of SSDs and traditional spinning disks into a single virtual disk.  Data is automatically moved between tiers based on usage patterns.

Multitenant, site-to-site VPN gateway inbox: Provides connectivity between physical and virtual networks, enterprise datacenters and hosting organizations, and between enterprise networks and Windows Azure.

And that just for starters… There are so much more to tell. There will be more info coming from the Windows Team, so keep coming back to this blog or the Windows Server Blog.

The first thing I did after the bits were released was to download them and wipe my lab clean and start over with Windows Server 2012 R2 at its core.

You can experience the goodness as well. Go ahead… Download the bits and see for yourselves.

Cheers!

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Pierre Roman, MCITP, ITIL | Technology Evangelist
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