Microsoft Announces Windows Server 2012 R2 at TechEd 2013 North America

During the TechEd North America Keynote yesterday, Microsoft unveiled Windows Server 2012 R2.

These products are slated for release by the end of the year, with a Preview version coming before the end of June.

At the heart of the Microsoft Cloud OS vision, Windows Server 2012 R2 brings Microsoft’s experience delivering global-scale cloud services into our customers’ infrastructure. Windows Server 2012 R2 offers exciting new features and enhancements across virtualization, storage, networking, virtual desktop infrastructure, access and information protection, and more.

New and enhanced features allow customers to take advantage of even better performance and more efficient capacity utilization in the datacenter, helping increase business agility. Windows Server 2012 R2 offers a proven, enterprise-class virtualization and cloud platform that can scale to continuously run the largest workloads while enabling robust recovery options to protect against service outages.

Here are some of the details on the added value that Windows Server 2012 R2 will bring.

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.

 

>>Download Windows Server 2012 now and get started

 

You can also register to be notified when the evaluation will be available here. 

You can see the official details here. And a white paper on Windows Server 2012 R2 can be found here.

 

Cheers!

 

Pierre Roman, MCITP, ITIL | Technology Evangelist
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