What’s New in 2012 R2: Open Source Platform Workloads and Management

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Transform the datacenter

Microsoft has become a strong platform company.  Customers want interoperability and the flexibility to run work loads in new and interesting ways.  We have challenged ourselves to support customer requirements for platforms that aren’t Windows. Our vision regarding other operating platforms is simple:  Microsoft is committed to being your cloud partner.  This means end-to-end support that is versatile, flexible, and interoperable for any industry, in any environment, with any guest OS.  This vision ensures we remain realistic – we know that users are going to build applications on open source operating systems, so we have built a powerful set of tools for hosting and managing them. 

A great deal of the responsibility to deliver the capabilities that enable the Microsoft Clouds (private, hosted, Azure) to effectively host Linux and the associated open source applications falls heavily on the shoulders of the Windows Server and System Center team. 

This week Microsoft VP Brad Anderson and Erin Chapple detail that focus in “What’s New in 2012 R2: Enabling Open Source Software”. Brad starts the discussion with some history around Common Engineering Criteria (CEC), knowledge ingrained in the product group management packs, then turns the discussion over to Erin to detail how we support running open source workloads.  It is a really good article so we hope you’ll take a few minutes to read through it.

You’ll also notice we are publishing several supporting blog articles today with more specifics.  “Running and Managing Linux and UNIX with Hyper-V and System Center” is a session delivered at TechEd 2013.  “Enabling Linux Support on Windows server 2012 R2 Hyper-V” is a new article with details on new capabilities in the R2 (“Blue”) wave of products. And because management is important, we wanted you to know how System Center Configuration Manager supports Linux and UNIX so please see “Extending Inventory on Linux and UNIX Computers in Configuration Manager” for more detail on OMI.

And for those of you interested in downloading some of the products and trying them, here are some resources to help you:

  • Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview download
  • System Center 2012 R2 Preview download
  • SQL Server 2014 Community Technology Preview 1 (CTP1) download

As always, follow us on Twitter via @MSCloud!

Written by Keith Combs, Microsoft Server and Tools