November 8, 2012 News Thursday: Beta Release of BizTalk Server 2013, News from PASS 2012, and more Server and Tools News!

by STB Blogger

BizTalk Server 2013 Beta Unveiled
Earlier this week, the BizTalk Server team announced the Beta release of BizTalk Server 2013. Since the Community Technology Preview (CTP) in August, the team added several capabilities, including SFTP support, ESBT integration, better SharePoint integration and simplified manageability via dependency tracking in BizTalk Admin console. The Beta bits are available for download, and these new capabilities will also be available in the Windows Azure Virtual Machine platform gallery soon.

For more information, read the BizTalk Server Team blog post.

News from the PASS Summit 2012
Today, the Professional Association of SQL Server (PASS) Summit 2012 continues, kicking off with Microsoft corporate vice president Quentin Clark’s keynote. Quentin will continue to discuss themes around new capabilities for Microsoft’s data platform announced in yesterday’s keynote:

• Project codenamed “Hekaton,” a new in-memory technology that will ship in the next major version of SQL Server. Check out the SQL Server website for more details.
• SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW), the next version of Microsoft’s enterprise-class appliance, available in the first half of 2013. Visit the SQL Server website for more details.
• SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 1 (SP1), available for immediate download here. SQL Server 2012 SP1 supports Office 2013 by offering business users enhanced, new capabilities for self-service business intelligence using familiar tools such as Excel and SharePoint.

For more information about announcements from the event, please visit the Servers and Infrastructure Virtual Pressroom. You can also view both keynotes from Ted Kummert and Quentin Clark at the SQL Server website.

Microsoft Partners Showcase New Solutions at PASS 2012
At this year’s PASS event, several key Microsoft partners demonstrated how they are using Microsoft database technologies to deliver value to customers. Specific partner announcements included:

• Melissa Data launched data quality tools for all editions of SQL Server 2012.
• SQL Sentry introduced the v7.2 release candidate of their SQL Sentry Power Suite monitoring solution.
• Pragmatic Works announced the release of BI xPress with DBA xPress, which includes new features designed specifically for database administrators.

ESG Labs Reveals Improved Hyper-V Scalability and Performance of Virtualized Enterprise Applications
A recent evaluation by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) Labs of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V revealed significant improvements in performance, scalability and total cost of ownership (TCO) for SQL Server 2012 tier-1 workloads, along with negligible virtualization performance overhead.  As the evaluation report says, “Workloads that used to be difficult to virtualize due to heavy server processing can now be deployed with confidence.”

These improvements result from new Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V features designed to provide additional support for tier- 1 and 2 workloads across a variety of server applications. Enhancements include:
• Support for up to 64 vCPUs
• Up to 1 TB of memory for Hyper-V guests
• New VHDX format supporting disk capacity up to 64 TB.
For more details on the ESG Labs evaluation results, check out our Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform blog or read ESG’s full and summary reports at these links.