In this video from ITFreeTraining I will look at some of the new features available in Windows
Server 2012. There are a lot of new features in Windows Server 2012 so let's get started.
Listed here are the new features in Windows Server 2012 that this video will look at.
This video will help you decide if your company should purchase or upgrade to Windows Server
2012. I will now have a closer look at each of these new features in more detail.
Windows Server 2008 introduced the server core interface. If the administrator chose
to install Server Core, the server would run with only the command prompt and would only
be able to display the simplest of graphical interfaces like that used in notepad. The
problem was the administrator had to choose at install time if they wanted to use server
core or the full graphical interface and it could not be changed later unless the whole
system was reinstalled. Unlike Windows Server 2008, Windows Server
2012 allows you to switch between core and the full interface at any time. It also introduces
another interface type called the minimal interface which is between the full GUI and
Server core interface. The decision which interface you want to use comes down to personal
preference and also which features are available in that interface.
As shown here, the GUI interface is simply a feature of the operating system. To remove
the GUI interface all you need to do is remove the feature and restart the server. If you
are running server core and want to use the graphical interface, it is a simple matter
of adding the "user interfaces and infrastructure" feature to server core using PowerShell and
restarting the server. No longer do you need to make the decision at install time which
interface to use and be stuck with that interface. Although server core is not new in Windows
Server 2012, Microsoft has improved Server core. With Windows Server 2012, Microsoft
has increased the number of roles that are supported by Server Core. Out of the 19 roles
in Windows Server 2012, 12 of these roles are available in Server Core. Previously only
9 were available in Windows Server 2008 and 10 in Windows Server 2008 R2.
As shown, these roles are not supported by server core.
This is an increase from the 9 roles and Windows Server 2008 and 10 roles
in Windows Server 2008 R2. In Windows Server 2012, Server Core also includes
support for Sql Server. Previously you would not be able to run Sql Server in server core.
Microsoft has done a lot of work on Server Core to make it a more viable option for administrators.
The next big change is to server manager. The interface of server manager has changed
significantly. The idea behind the changes is that the administrator would be able to
access most administration functions from server manager. You will find that a lot of
administration can be performed from server manager and there are links to launch tools
and troubleshooting information. The next major change is that you can now
manage pools of servers from server manager rather than just the single server. For example,
if you wanted to install the same role on multiple servers it would be quite easy to
do from server manager. If I were to open server manager, you would
notice that the interface looks very different from server manager in Windows Server 2008.
At the bottom of the screen notice that for each role that is installed on this server
there is a tile. This gives the administrator some shortcuts to access the role and configure
it and also provides additional information on how the performance of the server is going.
On the left hand side, you can select the option local server to obtain information about this
server. This will give you basic information about the server, for example if the server
has remote management enabled. The next option down, all servers, shows all
the servers that you can configure in Server Manager. In this case there is only one server
listed. If I right click all servers and select add Servers, I can add an additional server
to the list. Once the server is added, I can configure multiple servers at the same time.
For example, if I had multiple servers that I wanted to install the DNS role on, I could
from this server, install the role on all the required servers at the same time.
If I select AD DS on the right hand side, this will show you information about Active
Directory Domain Services. This will show you a lot of information about Active Directory,
not just on this server but on other servers with Active Directory Domain Services role
installed on it. If I scroll down, notice information like
events that have been generated, the current status of the service running, the best practices
analyzer, performance and the roles and features installed. The idea is Microsoft has grouped
a lot of useful information in the one window making it easier for the administrator.
If I select the last option, File and Storage Services, notice that additional options appear
allowing the administrator to create storage pools, and shares, among other things. You
can start to see how much administration can be done using server manager alone.
The next feature that I will look at is Storage Spaces. This is available in Windows Server
and Windows 8. This feature allows you to combine multiple hard disks together to form
one storage space. These can be internal or external hard disks. For example, you could
combine an internal hard disk with a hard disk connected by USB.
Once you have the storage space configured, you are free to divide this area in separate
drives. Just like a physical hard disk, this newly allocated space will appear in the operating
system as a drive can be assigned a drive letter.
Storage spaces also support redundancy. This means that if a hard disk fails or is disconnected
you will not lose any data any your data will still be available.
Storage space also supports thin provisioning. This means that space on the drive is only
required when it is needed. For example, if you created a 100 Gigabyte drive that was
only using 1 Gigabyte of space, it would only take up 1 Gigabyte of space in the storage
space. Thin provisioning is often used with virtual machines to make the best use of space
available. The next new feature is the resilient File
System or ReFS. This is referred to as a next generation file system with the aim to replace
NTFS. NTFS has been around since the 1990's and has been improved as needed.
In order to implement some new features in the file system, a completely new approach
was taken in how data was written to the hard disk. This helped reduce the chance of corruption
in the metadata. The metadata is the information that Windows uses to locate your data on the
hard disk. This includes checksum on data and the metadata in case there is a problem
with the hard disk. The new approach allows ReFS to be self healing.
Self healing means that as problems are encountered on the hard disk they can be fixed, often
without having to unmount the drive. If the drive is the system drive, then unmounting
the drive would often mean problems could only be fixed if the computer was rebooted.
ReFS reduces downtime by reducing the number of reboots required to fix hard disk problems.
There are some limitations if you do decide to use ReFS. ReFS does not support the following.
It does not support booting so you cannot use it for the system drive. This means for
the present, you will only be able to use it for data drives. Next it does not support
software disk quotas. If you need to use disk quotas you will need to use NTFS.
Next ReFS does not support EFS encryption or compression. If you need either of these
features you will once again be stuck with NTFS.
Lastly since this is new technology, the file system will only work with Windows 8 or Windows
Server 2012. It is possible that Microsoft will release updates to allow the file system
to be used on previous operating systems and address some of the short falls that I have
mentioned. With all these changes to file storage there
also comes a new network protocol, SMB 3.0. SMB is the protocol that is used to access
network shares. With an SMB 3.0 there are a lot of improvements. First, the protocol
allows block features. Block features mean that the low level data on the drive can be
accessed. This is generally used by low level tools like disk defragmentation and some backup
software. Previously if you required block access you would need a physical hard disk
connected to the server or you could also use protocols like ISCSI. ISCSI is a protocol
that allows computers to access a hard disk over the network like it was a physically
connected SCSI hard drive. SMB 3.0 also provides high availability features.
For example it allows transparent failover. For example, often when a server hosts a file
share and it was to fail, the user was redirected to a different server, and the process would
result in a dropped connected. The computer would reconnect to the file share on the new
server but the process was not smooth and was noticeable to the user. Hopefully with
SMB 3.0, when a server fails, the user will be redirected to another file share containing
the same data and they may not even notice. The next feature is SMB multichannel. In high
performance environments, an administrator may choose to combine multiple data paths
into one. This may be for redundancy or performance reasons.
There are a lot of new features in SMB 3.0, the last feature that I will look at is it
allows virtual machines to be hosted on a file share. All though performance may be
slow running a virtual machine over a network, SMB 3.0 supports it.
The next feature that I will look at is DirectAccess. DirectAccess is available in Windows 7 and
Windows Server 2008 R2 but it has now been improved. The most noticeable difference
is that it no longer requires IPv6. Previously DirectAccess required IPv6, so often the administrator
had to rely on transition protocols in order to get a connection back to the office over
the IPv4 network. Direct Access is also much more transparent
than before. If set up correctly, it should be able to connect back to the office without
the user realizing that a connection has been made. For this reason, it has been designed
as a replacement for VPN. Like traditional VPN software, it should allow the user to
access the office via a secure connection, however accessing the internet would be done
directly via the connection that they are using rather than routing the traffic for
the internet via the office. The advantage of DirectAccess over a VPN is no additional
software needs to be configure on their computer in order to get it to work and the user does
not need to worry about running any software to make a connection back to the office.
The next set of improvements are with Hyper-V. Microsoft has released 10 features for Hyper-V
and updated 7 old features to add additional functionality. I won't go through them all,
just the main ones. The first one is there has been improvements
made to the importing and migration of virtual machines. Previously when you imported a virtual
machine into Hyper-V there may have been configuration problems. Hyper-V is a lot better a picking
up this configuration and fixing problems. Hyper-V also supports live migration of virtual
machines when the virtual machines are being used in a non-clustered environment. This
makes it easier to move virtual machines from server to server as required.
The next new feature is resource metering. This allows the administrator to track how
much CPU, memory and network resources are being used by each virtual machine. Using
this information the administrator will be able to better allocate and manage resources
on the Hyper-V based on the virtual machines that are running on the server.
The next big feature of Hyper-V is replication. Replication allows you to have one virtual
server and replicate the server to a backup server located on another part of the network.
The backup server could also be at a different site.
All though these may seem like a high availability solution, it is not. Changes are saved up
and transferred at once. This means the state of the backup virtual machine maybe several
minutes behind. Hyper-V allows snapshots to be recorded on the backup machine. This means
that if your main virtual machine were to fail, you would have a choice of snapshots on the
backup virtual machine to recover from. The solution is not a high availability solution,
however for companies that want some kind of redundancy and are willing to lose a few
changes during the process, this can work as a low cost disaster solution.
The last feature that I want to look at is RemoteFX. This was introduced in Windows Server
2008 R2 service pack 1. RemoteFX allows a 3d animation to be rendered
on the server and then sent to the remote client. This means that an old client that
does not have 3D hardware can display 3D graphics even though it may only have a 2D graphics
card. The big change with Windows Server 2012
is that RemoteFX no longer requires 3D hardware in the server. In Windows Server 2008 R2,
in order to use RemoteFX it required a supported graphics card. These tended to be high end
graphics cards, meaning the average 3D graphics card could not work with RemoteFX in Windows
Server 2008 R2. Of course, if you use a lot of RemoteFX on the server without a good graphics
card, this will put more strain on the CPU and cause performance problems. However, if
you have only the old rarely used application that needs few 3D graphics, this can save
you from having to purchase additional hardware in order to get that application to work on
your thin clients. Well that's it for the new features in Windows
Server 2012. Not a complete list, but does cover the major changes. I hope you have enjoyed
this video from ITFreeTraining and I look forward to seeing you in our other Windows
Server 2012 videos. All the videos from this course and others are completely free and
aimed at getting you certificated in the IT industry. Thanks and see you next time.