- Greetings everyone. My name is Jeff Woolsey.
I'm a principal program manager here at Microsoft,
and I'm here with Ned Pyle.
- Hey folks, Ned Pyle, principal PM at Microsoft
and Windows Server.
- Thank you very much.
And today we're here with Sneak Peak,
what's new and next for Windows Server.
Now right off the bat, I want to say super clear,
this is a sneak peek.
This is not a full feature list.
We're just not doing that today.
We've got plenty of new things though
that we definitely want to tease and talk about.
And let's start off with, of course,
one of my favorite topics, Windows Admin Center.
As I've been saying,
and we've been saying now for many years,
the future of all new Windows Server
graphical user interface is all happening in Admin Center.
It started in 2016.
We did more of that in 2019.
A couple of examples,
the fantastic storage migration service delivered by Ned,
all of the awesome UI for that is in Admin Center.
While the core engine, while the core technology is built
into Windows Server 2019, all the UI is there.
Another fantastic example is system insights.
Again, a brand new feature of 2019,
but all the UI's in Admin Center.
If you're not using it already,
you can download it at AKA.ms/WACdownload.
I point this out because we're going to continue
to deliver new innovation for Windows Server
there in Admin Center.
And I wanted to take a moment
to talk about product principles really quickly,
'cause I'm constantly asked, you know,
"How does Admin Center compare with System Center?
How does it compare with the Azure portal?"
Well, number one, it's complementary.
It complements System Center,
it complements Azure Arc
and it complements the Azure portal.
You're not gonna see us do things
like put the Azure Portal in an I-frame in Admin Center.
That just doesn't make sense.
They will continue to be complementary.
Also, it's first class.
Windows Server is a first-class citizen
in all of the UI again, for the future for Windows Server
is going into Admin Center.
Also, it's unified.
The Admin Center code is not gonna be forked
or used in different use cases.
It's all built in here.
Also it's hybrid.
We continue to make more innovations
in the hybrid space and Admin Center.
And of course, most importantly, it's customer driven.
Just like this Windows Server Summit,
we are listening to you,
we are building new features, new capabilities,
new tools based on your feedback.
So a huge thank you to all of you for doing that.
And that shows in the latest release
of Windows Server Admin Center version 2009, just released.
You can see there's a whole bunch of new features
across the gamut from core management tools
to Azure Stack HCI, to Kubernetes,
to Windows Admin Center in the Azure portal.
And if you just look at the core management tools,
the VM tool got a huge overhaul and facelift
with a whole bunch of new features.
A new action bar, live storage migration and more.
We've got improved file shares and containers tool and more.
We got more integration from our partners like Dell,
HP, DataON and more.
And you're gonna see that we're gonna continue
to deliver more Windows Server innovation.
More core tools for example, are gonna happen
in Admin Center for Windows Server going forward.
Well, with that, I want to take a moment
and pass it on over to Ned,
'cause Ned, you've got a whole bunch of new features
that you're gonna be handling as well.
- Yeah, Jeff, I have a ton of stuff to talk about.
Way more to talk about than I could possibly fit
into these few minutes we have here.
First thing first, storage migration service
is gonna be getting a bunch of significant updates.
Now you've already known that we've done...
We've added cluster support, Samba support,
local security migration.
That all happened since we shipped the service in 2019.
In the 10C release, which basically is the October optional
or the November you-gotta-have-it cumulative update,
you'll get big performance improvements
from transfer speeds.
You'll get WAC improvements
that make the experience easier to use.
You'll get inventory validation,
which everybody's been asking for for the last year.
And you know, the usual fixes.
But then we also have some really big,
interesting stuff coming.
We will support migrating NetApp sources now.
So if you use NetApp arrays, stiffs arrays,
you can migrate those to Windows Server,
standalone or cluster.
You can have a migration experience, which is very seamless,
exactly like you came off of Windows,
exactly like you came off of Samba.
You'll start with a server that looks like NetApp
to the customers.
You'll end with a server that still basically looks
like a bunch of SMB shares
just like NetApp was emulating and doing,
but now it'll be on Windows.
And that's coming this spring.
That's coming very, very soon actually.
That coding is done.
You see now that we have a new job type
and you specify just some NetApp information and that's it.
The experience after that is almost identical
so you won't have to retrain any of your staff.
It'll just start working
and instead of being a Windows source,
it'll be some NetApp SIFTS, SVMs, as their sources
now that will migrate into Windows.
I've also got DFS migration coming for you.
You've all been asking for this.
Migrate DFS Namespaces, domain-based ones.
It will again be an experience
which is very easy to pick up.
You'll get into WAC,
you'll start your regular SMS migration.
We'll see a new screen that says, you know,
do you think the DFS is here?
Yes?
Click a check box. That's it.
The whole experience is otherwise unchanged.
We will go and find the route.
We will make a new route on your new server.
We'll take over the old one
just like we did with the file server
and no users or applications are the wiser.
And yes, I know you're asking for DFSR.
I have a nice, long, comprehensive spec written for that
and we are gonna start working on that soon too.
- I love to see the DFSR there.
I've gotten many requests
for that one too, Ned, so great job.
Thanks for working on that.
- The next thing is
we've reached the phase of SMS migrations now
where we're reaching into the other stuff
besides, you know, the SMB file server.
So we've reached that point
where we can do the file server part really easily
from almost any source that you would care about.
And now we're getting into like all the millions
of other features that you might care about
that are file-server related.
And so we're making good headway there.
- Awesome. - One last little thing here.
If you're an Azure file sync customer, you know,
where you use cloud tiering to take a regular file server,
you put an agent on there and all your files
go up to Azure files,
we're integrating with that now as well
so that when you're doing migrations,
you can go to an Azure file sync target
that has almost no storage on it,
could never hold your source server,
and as you do the migration,
we will see that it's running out of space
as it tries to upload all this extra stuff into Azure.
We'll be like, "Whoa, hold on."
We're gonna pause, let it catch up.
And we have a nice little dashboard that shows you
that we're paused and how far you've progressed
and all that kind of stuff.
It's great. It's very nice.
And that's coming next year too.
Probably pretty early in the year, actually.
- And that's another really good example
of the hybrid integration that we're doing,
where we're just kind of making this,
again, a single checkbox.
That's really awesome and amazing what we're doing,
bringing the the hybrid capabilities of your on-prem,
the best of your on-prem file sync to Azure together,
and then simplifying it with this integration.
That's really awesome.
- The UI's gotta be easy enough that even I could use it,
that's kind of the rule. (Jeff laughing)
- Clock says that's about as far as we go.
So I want to show you some interesting things
we've just recently done with file services.
We have a new file share administration
that's came out in WAC at Ignite.
I don't know if you know about it yet, in the 2009 build.
SMB compression has been around for a while,
but we finally released the tools to use it
in the 20H2 release so you can use that
with 2019 servers or 20H2 machines.
And then I'm gonna show you SMB over QUIC.
So this is me connected
to a nice WAC instance, pointed to a server.
Notice that I now have file sharing on the left-hand menu.
And if I connect in there, I have a file share option now,
and I can do good, basic level, file server administration.
So I have this nice dashboard now.
It shows me all the settings that are applied
to the various shares on this machine.
It lets me see the entire UNC path that a user would use.
I can copy and paste that and go open it.
You know, I have the ability to now create a share.
I can browse for shares unlike before
where I'd have to type things in.
I can go and add a new folder.
I can create everything on the fly,
clicking, not typing, right?
Like that's why we call it Windows.
And I can pick some, you know, a thing I just created here
and now I'm gonna create my share and I can set permissions.
Now I can search active directory.
I can search local users and groups.
There's no more typing stuff in and getting it wrong
and then finding out later on that you got it wrong, right?
That's nonsense.
Nobody wants to do that stuff.
So now I can search.
I could find users.
We have lots of other updates coming to this product.
This is just the very first release that just came out.
But I will actually have updates coming
through the feed really quite often,
probably the next few weeks to start.
Notice how I can change encryption settings here now.
- [Jeff] Love this.
- [Ned] And turn on access-based integration.
And I can do leasing, most stuff.
All these things used to be PowerShell, only buried.
You'd never find them in a thousand years.
And I click my share and my share is, you know,
there it is, simple like that.
But there's more.
If I go down to settings,
and look, I now have a file shares general global settings
for my server.
I can turn on signing, encryption,
I can do SMB 1 auditing which you shouldn't need
as I'm sure you're not using SMB 1 anymore.
It's no big deal.
And I have all this nice, easy, clean way
to go through and manage stuff.
All of this before was PowerShell.
All this that's terrible.
And now you just have it in a nice WAC experience.
If I go over to SMB compression now,
here's a quick demo I can run.
Now, you've all used robocopy to copy files.
I'm copying here a 10 gigabyte file.
Here it is, okay.
And it's a file that's fairly compressible.
Let's say it's a VHD, for example,
that has a fair amount of white space in them oftentimes
especially fixed disks.
Now look, here's my network.
I'm going pretty quick.
I mean, I'm doing a good copy here
over a one gigabit ethernet connection.
I'm getting, you know, decent megabits per second,
but I'm using up the network, right?
I mean, I'm really pounding the nonsense out of it.
And it's gonna take a while
so I'm just gonna time-lapse this
so we're not sitting here waiting
for several minutes for my demo.
And you can see I'm pretty, you know,
I'm chewing up this network pretty badly.
And it's done.
It took about two minutes to copy my 10 gig file
which is totally normal and fine, okay?
- [Jeff] Yeah.
- [Ned] So now, what I want to be able to do
is I'll delete that file
and this time I'm gonna copy it again
still using robocopy, still the same file.
still the same destination, still the same network.
Nothing has changed at all here,
except that this time I'll copy it with the compressed flag.
So I do slash compress here.
And I'm not time compressing this.
- [Jeff] Holy cow.
- [Ned] So this is flying, right?
Look at my ethernet usage.
- Dude, that's crazy. - I'm not really copying
the file anymore, right?
I'm copying absence of data.
You know, I've compressed everything.
I've removed a lot of white space out of the files.
I sent it over the wire.
I'm not zipping at first,
which you could have done in the past,
which is super annoying.
An extra step, right?
And it's done in 23 seconds, not two minutes.
So that kind of like, you know, hauled, right?
That's pretty decent.
I can see myself using that a lot.
And one of the things we'll do after, after...
By the time probably the late insiders builds come out`,
we'll let you map a drive,
and then whatever you copy over that,
if you use Explorer or if you use, I don't know,
whatever tool you want, they'll all get compressed to them.
- So if you're like me, copying virtual machines around,
that's gonna be a huge time saver.
- Yeah, I mean, if you copy ISOs and VHDs
and big CAD files and stuff, they're always full of like,
they're a gigantic file, right?
Giant raw files for photography and stuff.
Tons of white space, tons of inefficiencies
that is designed for, you know, higher fidelity.
So last thing I'm gonna show you here is SMB over QUIC.
SMB over QUIC is sort of the future
of computing in distributed systems.
The way that QUIC is the future.
Mobile and edge-ready SMB
means we are getting rid of TCP here
and replacing it with a QUIC protocol.
So you're going over UDP, port 443, no longer a TCP 445.
You are always encrypted with TLS 1.3.
You are always using a certificate
and you're using an IATF standardized protocol with QUIC,
the same way you would be with TCP, right?
This is not some made-up Microsoft thing.
This is gonna be a standardized protocol.
And the cool thing about that is,
I'm using it like a VPN tunnel, right?
So I don't need to change my user experience to use this.
I'm creating a tunnel and putting SMB inside of it.
And any other team that wants to put stuff inside of things,
HTTP 3 and other protocols out there are doing this.
The user experience doesn't really change.
So if I do a demo here, I've got a...
I'm just logged into some machine
and I'm going to map a drive to a machine running in Azure.
Now, there's almost no way to get SMB
to work to a machine running an Azure.
Your ISP will block you.
Your business will block you.
Azure will block you.
Like everybody- - Oh yeah.
This isn't gonna work.
- Right, so I'm gonna try and log in here,
just using the account on that machine,
over using just regular SMB, TCP 445.
And my experience will just be it won't connect.
And the Explorer experience here, you'll just...
It'll just prompt me again.
Not sure what to do.
It was never expecting me not to be able to connect.
And once that happens, I'm stuck right now in today's world.
In tomorrow's world, where I turn on SMB over QUIC
on the destination server,
notice how I'm running Wireshark over here
just so you can see what's happening in the background.
I'm just mapping a drive again,
but think about the user experience here.
I'm not doing anything differently.
I'm still typing in my credentials like normal
or using existing credentials I have
that passed through like normal with Kerberos or NTLM
and when I'm connecting, I'm now,
if you look over there on the left hand side,
it's not SMB, it's QUIC holding SMB inside of it.
You can see the drive actually mapped.
If I look at the Wireshark, look, payloads going across,
it's no longer saying SMB 2, like it should, right?
It saying QUIC.
And if I look at these, I can't see anything inside of them.
They are always, always protected by TLS
and there's no way out of that.
So you've basically got a VPN tunnel that works on the fly
for SMB with no configuration changes required
on the client at all.
- So you didn't set up express route or a VPN
or some sort of extended network.
- No, I have a server sitting at the edge
and the DMZ somewhere that says,
"Allow port 443 over to this interface
and this SMB endpoint."
And that's it. The end.
- That is super sweet.
Wow.
Awesome.
Okay.
Thank you, Ned.
That is really cool.
So as you can see, again, just a sneak peek
and I really wanted to focus on a bunch of the cool things
that Ned's been working on in the SMB protocol
and a bunch of the things we're doing with the file server
and a bunch of the things you're seeing, of course,
in terms of Admin Center.
Just a reminder, of course,
we have an ongoing commitment to Windows Server.
We have insiders release every two weeks.
So if you want to start to take a look at some of the work
that we're doing here with a QUIC and the file server,
you can start to do that.
Also in terms of Admin Center,
Admin Center releases insider releases as well
every two weeks.
Of course, semi-annual channel,
the stack build is really for container innovation
for people that want to be able to take advantage
of the latest container things that we do,
usually in the open-source world like Kubernetes,
Calico and so much more.
That's what's going on in the semi-annual channel.
And of course we have long-term servicing channel, the LTSC.
I like to call this business as usual.
This is what we've been doing in Windows Server now
for over the last 20 years where we release a new version
every two to three years.
And of course we are working on the next.
We don't have a name for it.
We're not ready to talk about.
But again, this is a sneak peak.
So I hope to give you, you know, a cool idea
of some of the great things we're working on
in the next release of Windows Server.
I also want to point out,
if you're looking for lots of information
about the current products, 2016, 2019,
as well as new insider releases come out,
take a look at docs.microsoft.com.
This is really where you want to go to check out
all of our docs for Windows, Windows Server,
Azure, and so much more.
And with that, just want to remind you,
you can learn more about Azure portal.
Don't forget to download Admin Center for free.
Join the insiders program to get access
to the new Windows Server, vNext LTSC.
Check out the Azure migration program.
And if you want to know more about SMS,
SMB and other file services,
take a look at the server storage blog
and the IT Ops Talk blog.
And with that, I just want to say thank you very much.
It really was a pleasure.
Thanks, Ned, really appreciate the demos.
Really, really awesome.
- Thanks so much.
- To all of our friends around the world,
(speaking foreign languages)
- Thanks for joining us.
- Thank you very much.
- Thank you so much for watching.
Take care, and until next time.
- Thank you for attending.
Thank you for your passion and thank you for your feedback.
- Thank you for coming and listening
to what we had to say today.
- Wow, what an amazing community.
Thank you for bringing Windows Server to life.
Thank you for trusting us with your most critical workloads
and thank you for innovating
on top of the products that we build.
Windows Server wouldn't be where it is today
without all your care, attention and commitment.
- Thank you for everyone.
We'll see you at the next one.
(exciting music)