Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Server 8 has started gaining some prominence since the software giant previewed it at the BUILD conference. Its cloud-based paradigm and focus on large-scale deployments is self-evident, and at least one executive from Microsoft has called Windows Server 8 “the most cloud-optimized OS” developed by the Redmond-based company.
For now, its availability as a developer preview on MSDN means that various in-depth assessments of its capabilities are starting to roll in. It is clear even at this early stage that the next server operating system from Microsoft is a technically sophisticated one, and crammed with capabilities that bring many previously enterprise-only capabilities to small and mid-sized businesses.
This slideshow highlights some of the top features businesses can expect from Windows Server 8.
Click through for eight hot features that will be found in Windows Server 8, as identified by Paul Mah.
Microsoft has completely redesigned the Server Manager as a multi-server management tool that also combines formerly separate administrative utilities into a single interface. A dashboard shows the various servers in the network according to their roles or any other logical groupings. From the Server Manager, administrators are able to drill right down into running (and problematic) services on individual machines. For certain operations, it is also possible to select multiple servers to execute them with a single click of the mouse.
Windows Server 8 comes with data deduplication, a specialized data compression technique typically found only in high-end SAN. Deduplication can achieve substantial reduction of storage space by detecting duplicate data and storing it only once. Given its greatly enhanced virtualization capabilities (more on that later), administrators can expect themselves to be working a lot more with large virtual machine images — one candidate that can benefit greatly from data deduplication.
Storage Pools and Storage Spaces are two new storage abstraction technologies that complement each other to dramatically improve the storage handling capabilities of Windows Server 8. Storage pools essentially aggregate the physical storage capacity of disparate hard disk drives into a single storage space. No special hardware is required, and new disks can be dynamically added to bolster storage capacity. On its part, storage spaces let an administrator create virtual disks with specific levels of resilience. Similar to traditional RAID, data protection levels can be configured to none, mirror or parity, thin provisioning-like abilities mean that the virtual disks can be configured to be larger than the available space in a storage pool.
Windows Server 8 now comes with native support for NIC teaming, in which two (or more) network cards work in tandem for failover and better performance. Also known as link aggregation, Paul Mah has written about how this can help SMBs overcome their network bottleneck. On a practical note, the built-in support for NIC teaming in Windows Server 8 means that SMBs no longer have to rely on specialized NICs from vendors such as Broadcom and Intel to access the same feature, and can use NICs from their favorite vendors instead. Moreover, load balancing and failover support for heterogeneous NIC are also supported.
In line with Microsoft’s vision of a cloud-capable Windows Server, version 3 of Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization engine is a significant step up in terms of its capabilities. For one, the inclusion of PowerShell support makes it possible to script virtual machines as part of administrative tasks. In addition, Microsoft has beefed up Hyper-V 3 to handle much larger workloads: Up to 160 logical processors with up to 2TB of memory are supported, while hosted VMs can access up to 32 virtual processors and 512GB of memory. NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) also means that VMs scale very well with additional virtual processors and memory. Finally, the lifting of VM restrictions will allow as many VMs as supported by hardware to run.
Unlike the pseudo-live migration Hyper-V found in Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 8 can now perform multiple concurrent live migrations with zero downtime. Underlying virtual machine (VM) files are also seamlessly transferred between server hosts, without the need for expensive shared storage infrastructure such as a SAN. The enhanced live migration is of significance as it translates into the ability for even SMBs to build a private cloud without incurring additional hardware (SAN) or software (ESX Server) costs. For instance, administrators can move VMs across physical machines during office hours to facilitate software patching or the upgrade of server hardware without incurring any downtime.
Microsoft has vastly expanded the number of PowerShell cmdlets in Windows Server 8 to provide comprehensive coverage of the various capabilities in Windows Server — including Hyper-V 3. In effect, the new GUI tools can be likened to a thin shell over the PowerShell scripting engine, whose purpose is to create the underlying PowerShell scripts that are executed to perform the actual task. Indeed, the new Active Directory Administrative Center will show PowerShell commands that have been executed, which will be useful for troubleshooting or learning. A PowerShell script can be executed locally, or remotely to manage a Windows Server 8 cloud.
Are you a mid-sized business concerned about being constrained by the limits of a private cloud deployment as the company grows larger? To address the high-availability requirements of large deployments, Windows Failover Clustering has been bumped up with Windows Server 8 clusters supporting up to 63 nodes and 4,000 VMs per cluster, leapfrogging the clusters of up to 32 hosts supported by VMware’s vSphere.