Microsoft's next-generation server platform offers mostly gain, little pain.
Microsoft officially released Windows Server 2012, the first of its
latest wave of new operating systems. It shares a few things with the
upcoming Windows 8 client operating system, including the same Windows
NT 6.2 kernel, and the same Metro and Desktop split-personality
graphical interface—at least if you choose to install it. It also shares
the same sort of cloud-centric focus as the Windows 8 client—except
rather than just connecting to cloud services, Server 2012 is intended
to be the building block for them.
Windows Server 2012 probably won’t have the adoption lag in the
enterprise that Windows 8 is bound to face. That's because, aside from
the Metro GUI, Server 2012’s biggest changes are in substance rather
than style, building upon what the company delivered with Windows Server
2008 Release 2 three years ago. In particular, Server 2012 takes two
management features Server 2008 R2 admins will be familiar with—Server
Manager and PowerShell—and expands on them considerably.
While many of the changes in Server 2012 are incremental improvements
over its predecessor, Windows Server 2008 Release 2, the new features
are more than evolutionary when taken as a whole. In the same way that
Microsoft has “embraced and extended” the functionality of tech
competitors and nominal partners in the past (from its “coopetition”
with Novell in networking to its “cutting off” of Netscape’s air supply
in the Web software market), Windows 2012 and related technology make
many previously advanced server and storage virtualization features into
a commodity. Hyper-V alone, which we’ll cover in greater depth later
this week, offers enough in the way of new features and capabilities
that it could disrupt the business models of VMware and other IT
companies that have profited from previous gaps in Microsoft’s
capabilities.
There’s far too much in Server 2012 to cover in one sitting. And given
that we've spent less than a week with the final code for Windows Server
2012 Standard Edition, we've certainly not been able to put it through
all its paces yet. So, in this first look at the finished product, we
cover the highlights of the new operating system from the perspective of
a small or mid-size organization. We take a look at the new storage and
file server features of the operating system, and some of the ways that
Server 2012 will make it easier for organizations to do
high-availability and disaster recovery without making big investments
in other hardware or software. And we also look at the improvements to
manageability and deployment in Server 2012, and how they integrate into
existing server deployments, as well as the licensing changes and the
way they’ll affect how (or if) you deploy Windows Server.
The new Standard
The two editions of Server 2012 being
released today—Standard and Datacenter—replace six of the editions of
Server 2008. The Small Business Standard, Enterprise, HPC, and Web
editions of Windows Server have been “retired," though Microsoft will
offer a free HPC software pack add-on to Standard and Datacenter for
high performance computing customers. The split is fairly simple. If
you're running a major application on a dedicated machine—Exchange and
SharePoint server apps, a SQL Server database, or just about anything
that goes beyond basic file and print services—you’ll be using the
Standard edition of the OS. If you're running a stack of VMs, you'll go
for the Datacenter edition.
Two other versions of Server 2012 will be available. The first,
Foundation edition, will only be sold through OEMs, and is intended as a
totally bare-bones server with no virtualization support. Another
version based on the same stripped-down code, Windows Server 2012
Essentials, will replace Windows Small Business Server Essentials 2011
and will be available later this year (Microsoft recently posted a
release candidate for Server Essentials, and we’ll take a first look at
it later this week).
Server 2012 Standard and Datacenter both support significantly larger
amounts of processing power, storage, and memory than Server 2008 R2. It
handles up to 320 “logical processors,” or CPU cores, double the
processing maximum for R2. Memory capacity is also doubled, up to 4
terabytes. And the failover clustering capabilities of Server 2012 have
been vastly expanded, supporting up to 64 cluster nodes—up from 16 in
the previous release.
PowerShell power
Server Manager gets a total makeover in Server 2012, and PowerShell is
given an even broader range of “commandlets” and interfaces to customize
and control the server OS and its features. Just about everything you
can configure within Server 2012 is exposed through PowerShell, and can
be locally or remotely scripted. That means that with just the tools
provided out of the box, a Windows administrator can control almost
every aspect of servers deployed locally or off in a cloud—whether it's a
private cloud hosted on-site or in a provider’s data center, or up in
someone’s public cloud and connected over the enhanced networking
features in Windows 2012.
Cutting to the Core
Even though you can install the full Windows 8-like UI atop Server 2012, you probably won’t want to. Better yet, you don’t have
to. Like its predecessor, Windows Server 2012 can be deployed with the
graphical interface, or as a “Server Core”—that is, with a minimal user
interface that includes the command line and the PowerShell command
interpreter.
The initial install of both Standard and Datacenter from the DVD allows
one of two options: with the full Windows 8 graphic user interface, or
“Server Core”—with only a command line window to work from locally.
That’s similar to the choice Windows Server 2008 R2 offered, and the
installation process itself looks just like the Server 2008 R2 install
with a fresh coat of Metro-ish paint.
Better uptime
There are a number of features in Server 2012 that can significantly
improve the resilience of an organization’s applications, whether
they’re deployed in a data center or on a couple of servers in the back
room. Improvements in Hyper-V virtualization, storage functionality, and
the networking features of Server 2012 all add ways to make servers
less likely to fail—and in the event that they do, make it easier to
quickly recover.
The improvements to Hyper-V over the last version of the hypervisor are
legion. Hyper-V is almost a platform to itself as a result—and in fact,
the free Hyper-V Server, available as a download from Microsoft, offers
all of the same features as the hypervisor environment in Server 2012,
minus the management tools. For small organizations, a single copy of
Server 2012 could be used to configure and manage multiple standalone
Hyper-V servers to create a cluster of servers—even Linux-based server
instances—configured for automatic failover.
Hyper-V’s new replication feature can also be used as a disaster
recovery option. Unlike SAN-based DR solutions, or those currently
offered by VMware, Hyper-V doesn’t require the hardware on the other end
to be identical, or even have the same storage capacity. As long as the
virtual drives fit, they can be replicated and brought online remotely
in the event of a failure.
On the networking side, Server 2012 now supports network interface card
“teaming,” putting some or all of the NICs in a server into a pool under
a single IP address. This allows for both higher network throughput for
the server through a switch connection and for continued operation in
the event of a card failure. The feature even works in virtual
machines—you can configure each physical NIC as a virtual LAN switch,
and have Windows 2012 VMs “team” their own virtual network interfaces
across both physical NICs.
So long, SAN
Server 2012 also provides for a number of types of replication between
servers to improve the availability and uptime of data. One of these is
through Server 2012’s Distributed File Services’ Replication Groups,
which can synchronize data from point to point, in a mesh or hub-spoke
arrangement. This can be used to back up user files offsite or to
multiple backups, and can be configured to use a set amount of bandwidth
or replicate only at certain times of the day.
There are two other storage features in Server 2012 that are aimed at
making it easier to prevent a loss of data in the first place. First,
there’s the Resilient File System (ReFS), the new server file system,
designed to minimize the potential for disk corruption caused by power
failures by using the same “copy on write” approach used by the ZFS file
system developed by Sun Microsystems.
Storage Spaces supports a number of other SAN-like virtual storage
features, including thin provisioning—creating virtual disks that appear
to be larger for the sake of software installations, and that can be
expanded as required. And it supports clustering of servers around
external “Just a Bunch of Disks” (JBOD) SAS-connected storage systems,
so services can fail over to another server in the cluster in the event
of a server failure.
Then there’s Server 2012’s iSCSI support. Windows Server 2012’s File
Services can be configured as an iSCSI target for both physical and
virtual machines, providing block file storage on local drives for
remote systems. You can point diskless workstations at a volume on the
server as a boot source.
Combined with some enhancements to Windows Server’s SMB file sharing
protocol for application-specific storage and other enhancements in how
Server 2012 handles distributed file systems, these storage features
could make the operating system a suitable substitute for SAN hardware
in smaller environments. However, we haven’t had a chance to kick these
systems hard enough yet to get any real idea of their resilience yet.
Final first impressions
Once you have the basics worked out, deploying Windows Server 2012 in a
smaller environment—even using Server Core on most of the systems—is
pretty painless. And on the whole, Server 2012 performed up to
expectations in an initial testing of a wide range of its
features. Even when the system failed, it did so in a way that wasn't
traumatic. There were times when Hyper-V was pushed past its breaking
point, resulting in graceful shutdowns of the server rather than a
train-wreck screen of death.
There are a few bugs lingering about to be dealt with for organizations
that may want to mix and match their Windows Server versions for a while
as they test the waters. The Windows Server 2008 versions of Windows
Management Framework 3.0, for example, will be essential for
organizations that have to keep the older server release around a while
longer to support older software.
Cleanup aside, Server 2012 brings so much to the table that it should be
quickly picked up by small and mid-size organizations trying to make
themselves look bigger from an IT perspective. Even when you look at
the very narrow scope of its storage abilities, Server 2012 has a big
potential financial payoff in terms of lowering the cost of IT. And when
tied to hosted services in a public or private cloud, Server 2012 will
help IT administrators scale up or down on demand with a lot less pain
and a much smaller budget.
