Windows Server 2012 has been released on 4 September 2012. This version has brought a whole new Operating System with many new features, enhancements and more. In fact, the changes are so large that many IT Pros are still struggling with learning all those new items within Windows Server.
Enter 18 October 2013. Microsoft releases Windows Server 2012 R2. That’s only a bit over a year later. But instead of being some sort of Service Pack or bug fixes with some a few new features it turns out to be a major upgrade with many new (and requested features) and lots of enhancements to existing features.
The fact that they have released so quickly after the previous version is something new for Microsoft. While it normally took years before a new version is released, Microsoft is now working on a more frequent schedule. We should expect (but this is never confirmed) a new release every 12 to 18 months.
I’m leaving in the middle whether this is workable for many organizations to upgrade that quickly. I’m assuming that many organizations will skip a version from time to time and there is nothing wrong with that. But in the end, organizations will be forced to upgrade faster or they will risk staying behind, being less productive and losing business.
Windows Server 2012 R2 brings a lot of new capabilities to the infrastructure in many different areas. There are new features and enhancements in File Services, Storage, Networking, Clustering, Hyper-V, PowerShell, Windows Deployment Services, Directory Services and Security.
The next part is a high-level summary of different features and enhancements.
Windows Server Manager
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| Windows Server 2012 Server Manager |
Server Manager is one of the major changes of Windows Server 2012. With a new ‘look and feel’ of the Server Manager user interface, administrators now have the option to group multiple servers on their network and manage them centrally – a useful feature that will save valuable time. With this grouping feature, monitoring events, services, installed roles, performance, on multiple servers from a single window is easy, fast and requires very little effort.
File Services and Storage
Work Folders
One of the newest features is called Work Folders. This technology allows you to make corporate data available to users. Because the device that the user is working on doesn’t have to be domain joined he or she will be able to sync their data to ANY device allowing them to work with whatever device they want. That should stop the Dropbox, SkyDrive, email kind of solutions that end users are using today to get their information on their devices.
SMB
SMB is a file sharing protocol used in windows servers. In Windows Server 2012, SMB is now up to version 3.0 with new interesting features such as support for deduplication, hot pluggable interfaces, multichannel, encryption, Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for shared files, and many more.
In addition, Hyper-V’s Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) files and virtual machines can also be hosted on shared folders. This allows the effective usage of shared folders, ensuring you make the most out of all available resources.
DFS Namespace and DFS Replication
This is one of these features where many IT administrators have a hate/love relationship with. Luckily, in R2 a huge amount of improvements have been implemented to make our life much easier.
Recovery for database corruption, database cloning for initial synchronization, unexpected shutdown database recovery are among those improvements that are welcomed a lot. And there are quite some more.
One of the new features that I personally like is that you now have the possibility to recover files that are in the hidden DFSR private folders (ConflictAndDeleted and PreExisting folders) by using the Get-DfsPreservedFiles and Restore-DfsrPreservedFiles cmdlets.
iSCSI Target Server
iSCSI Target Server allows Windows Server to host block storage remotely. The cool thing about this is that it leverages the Ethernet network and doesn’t require additional or specialized hardware. A few of the improvements are that it now supports SMI-S which means Virtual Machine Manager Administrators will be able to leverage this. The most important improvement, however, is that iSCSI Target data persistence layer is redesigned and is now based on the VHDX format.
Storage Spaces
Storage Space is also another new feature of Windows Server 2012. This new feature pools different physical disks together and divides them into different spaces. These spaces are then used like regular disks. In the storage pool control panel (shown below), you can add any type or size of physical disks (e.g SSD, SCSI, SATA etc). You can also configure mirroring, raid redundancy and more.
Likewise, you can add storage at any time and the new space will be automatically available for use in storage space. Provisioning is also supported in Storage Space, allowing you to specify whether the new space be thin provisioned or thick. With thin provisioning, disk space is incremented automatically on a “as needed” basis, eliminating the need of occupying unnecessary disk space.
Data Deduplication
Data Deduplication is now a supported solution for your VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) environments.
This means that it is now supported on CSVs (Cluster Shared Volumes) and that it works on open files. There is also a great improvement on optimization performance and read/write performance. And last but not least; due to the way the data deduplication cache works you will notice a HUGE performance improvement by using data deduplication so it is a win-win situation.
Networking
DHCP
A few changes to the DHCP stack such as DNS registration enhancements (through extended DHCP policies) and the possibility to register resource records of DHCP clients with the DNS server to avoid failures from PTR (Pointer) resource records when there is not a reverse lookup zone.
DNS
In Windows Server 2012 there are already statistics available when you use the Get-DnsServerStatistics cmdlets. In R2 this is enhanced with ZoneQueryStatistics, Zonestransferstatistics, ZoneUpdateStatistics. The DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) support is also improved to ensure that DNS responses are authentic.
IPAM
IPAM (IP Address Management) has been significantly improved, as it is a popular feature in Windows Server 2012 but not easy to install and configure. Those items have been addressed and now you can place your data in a SQL server database, you can define security with role-based access control and you can manage virtual address spaces now.
Hyper-V Virtual Switch
With the introduction of the Hyper-V Virtual Switch in Windows Server 2012, Microsoft made an important step towards better networking in private, hybrid and cloud environments. The R2 version includes new features for manageability, security, isolation, visibility and scalability such as the possibility to specify port numbers for creating rules, third-party forwarding extensions working together with NVGRE, vRSS (Virtual Receive Side Scaling) and better network tracing.
Hyper-V Replica
Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V roles introduces a new capability – Hyper-V Replica - a feature many administrators will welcome.
This new feature allows the asynchronous replication of selected VMs to a backup replica server. On the local LAN, it means you get a full backup copy of your VMs to another hardware server, while on a WAN scale this can also be extended to backup VMs to a designated replicate site across a WAN infrastructure. Common examples of WAN backup replication are disaster recovery sites. The replication cycle has a minimum setting of 15 minute gaps between every replication. This means the backup VM will be 15 minutes behind its source - the primary VM.
When installed, Hyper-V Replica creates a snapshot of whole server, which usually requires a lot of time depending on the amount of data, and from there on, only changes are replicated.
Windows Server Gateway
The Windows Server Gateway is a virtual machine software router (template) that allows network traffic routing between virtual and physical networks, including the internet. Something very handy in your efforts to build private and hybrid clouds.
Clustering
Quite some changes on the clustering front. Automatic virtual machine drain on shutdown even if you are forgotten to place the node in maintenance mode. Lots of CSV improvements such as the possibility to allocate more cache, data deduplication and ReFS support and more. There is also new health detection mechanisms including the virtual machine network health detection. A lot of improvements to the quorum and last but not least there is a cluster dashboard now that will help you manage your clusters better.
Hyper-V
Similar to VMware’s ESXi hypervisor, Hyper-V is Microsoft’s offering of a virtualization platform. This important feature allows to run many instances of virtual machines on single physical Windows Server 2012. Hyper-V features such as live migration, dynamic memory, network virtualization, remoteFX, Hyper-V Replica, etc. have made the Hyper-V platform more competitive against other alternatives.
Remote Desktop Services
In Windows Server 2012 R2 there are a lot of new things in Remote Desktop Services. Session shadowing is now included. RemoteApp client behavior is much more the same then a local installed application. Transparency support, live thumbnails and seamless application moves are now part of that client.
There is now Quick Reconnect included in Remote Desktop clients and a huge amount of effort is placed in improving compression and bandwidth usage so that end-users have more fluent applications. Dynamic display handling, automatic recognition of an added monitor or project and support for DX11.1 are also included.
PowerShell
With Windows Server 2012 R2 comes PowerShell 4.0. Besides the usual bug fixes, new cmdlets and so on there are some other major enhancements also.
One of the new features is called Desired State Configuration (DSC) which is a management system that enables the deployment and management of configuration data or software services and the environment in which these services run.
Another new feature is called the Save-Help cmdlets which allows you to download the PowerShell cmdlets from a remote computer with internet access (even if the remote computer does not have the specific modules installed) and then copy those help files to the server or workstation that doesn’t have internet connection. Debugging has also enhanced and now you are allowed to debug a remote PowerShell workflow or script and even when the remote session disconnects and you reconnect then the debugging session will be preserved.
Windows Deployment Services
There hasn’t changed anything to the Windows Deployment Services except that it is now fully PowerShell supported. This is great if you want to build more automation in your deployments.
Directory Services & Security
Single Sign-On (SSO) is nothing new for domain-joined computers, in Windows Server 2012 R2 this technique has been brought to workplace joined devices also.
But there is much more. Today we can use techniques such as VPN, Direct Access, Remote Desktop Gateways and more to allow our users to connect to their data and applications. In R2 a new technology called Web Application Proxy role service is introduced to allow you to publish Line-of-Business web applications so that they can be accessed from outside of the corporate network.
And there is a lot more. Multi-Factor authentication is easier to implement and now supports a plug-in model. You can now use Multi-Factor access control policies based on various (and multiple) criteria. And there a lot of enhancements and improvements to BitLocker, TPM, TLS/SSL and more. Maybe the last one, from now on, when you install Windows Server 2012 R2 in core mode, Windows Defender will be automatically available and enabled.
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Windows Server 2012