WSV205: Windows Server 2012 Overview

Michael Leworthy, Senior Product Manager (Microsoft)

Top Benefits of Windows Server 2012

Comphrehensive Cloud Platform – Complete virtualization platform, industry leading scalability, business continunity in a box.
Cost savings and increased efficiencies – Reduced storage costs with storage spaces with other storage enhancements. Increased server/administrator ratio through Windows PowerShell and multi-machine management. 10x improvement in PowerShell cmdlets (over 2400)
Support for a modern work style – Simplified VDI management, optimize branch office WAN bandwidth usage

Hyper-V network virtualization – Migrate IPs across subnets and into a cloud provider. IP address translation, encapsulation.
Shared-nothing live migration – Live migrate outside of a cluster and with no shared storage. Only an ethernet cable is needed.
Massive scale- Up to 320 logical processors and 4TB of RAM per physical server.
Cluster enhancements – Previously serial migration; now simulatneous migration with no hard limit (just limited by bandwidth). Affinity and anti-affinity clusters. Fully supports encrypted storage for clusters.
Hyper-V replica – Disaster recovery
Hardware offloading – IP offloading, storage offloading
Virtual Fibre Channel –
Guest NUMA support
Runtime memory configuration – Adjust memory profile during runtime
Hypoer-V network switch – Extensible switch like the Nexus 1000v

Demod concurrent Live Migration
VHDs can be storage on SMB shares and they perform nearly like direct attached storage
Up to 1TB of RAM per VM
Up to 64 vCPUs per VM
Processor compatibility (EVC mode) for migration between Intel and AMD
VHDX format, up to 64TB per volume, plus 4K disk support
Network adapter hardware acceleration options (SR-IOV, IPsec offload, VMQ)
NIC teaming at the VM level (teaming within the NIC) or at the physical level
Live migrate a VM, and if the switch configuration differs, it will present an error and a wizard to select the new network name and continue the migration.
Hyper-V Replica – Supports replication to a provider using certificates, or internally using HTTP and kerberos.Out of the box functionality.

Manage multiple servers at one time. Good for up to 30-50, but no hard limit
Create a server group and add servers. You can then manage and monitor them as a group. Metro-style overview.
Multi-server volume manager- View volume sizes, extend volumes, dedupe rates, etc.
GUI is context aware – Right click on a server and it only lists the tools/options relevant to that server.
PowerShell ISE – Intellisense for ease of scripting
PowerShell web access
GUI is now a role you can turn off and on. Flip between server core and desktop mode. Reboot required.

Storage Spaces – Virtual disk infrastructure using JBOD
File system improvements – Greatly enhanced self-healing
Thin provisioning and trimming
Cluster shared volume – Supports encryption
SMB 3.0 for workloads – Support Hyper-V and SQL server
Offloaded data transfer (ODX) – SAN offloaded data transfer
Transparent failover – Ensures planned or unplanned downtime doesn’t impact SMB shares. Active/active file shares.
NFS support – ODX, transparent failover support
iSCSI target
Storage management

Website density and multitenancy
Application initialization
Dynamic IP restrictions
CPU throttling
NUMA-aware scalability
Centralized SSL management and certifcate updating. Cut and paste certs as if they were files.
“Just works” with PHP and node.js
Embracing web standards
Application symmetry
Community development platform

Dynamic Access Control
Classification
DirectAccess
Simpler deployment of Active Directory via powershell
Domain name security extensions
Active Directory virtualization – No longer a problem
Active Directory cloning – Drag and drop a new DC
Kerberos constrained delegation – E.g. Setup a jumpbox to manage certain servers
Private virtual LAN (PVLAN)
Multitenant security and isolation