Microsoft has announced the technical preview of the Windows Server 2016
In respect to Visualization few updates are introduced which are required for Hyper-V to upscale the uptime. Significant changes are seen at network, storage and management side. Microsoft announced a new installation option, Nano Server, a minimal footprint installation option of Windows Server, optimized for Windows Server Containers and Hyper-V Containers.
Compute and Virtualization: Simplified upgrades, new installment options, and increased resilience, helping you ensure the stability of the infrastructure without limiting agility.
- Rolling upgrades for Hyper-V and scale-out file server clusters for faster adoption of new operating systems
- Functionality for hot add and remove memory and NIC, reducing downtime
- Virtual machine compute resiliency, so that virtual machines continue running even if the compute cluster fabric service fails
- Nano Server, a deeply refactored version of Windows Server with a small footprint and remotely managed installation, optimized for the cloud and a DevOps workflow
Networking: Continued investment to make networking as flexible and cost-effective as possible while ensuring high performance.
- Converged NIC across tenant and RDMA traffic to optimize costs, enabling high performance and network fault tolerance with only 2 NICs instead of 4
- PacketDirect on 40G to optimize performance
Storage: Expanding capabilities in software-defined storage with an emphasis on resilience, reduced cost, and increased control.
- Virtual Machine Storage Path resiliency, enabling virtual machines to pause and restart gracefully in response to either transient or permanent storage path failures
- Storage Spaces Direct to enable aggregation of Storage Spaces across multiple servers, pushing the cost of storage down while allowing for increased scale out
- Storage quality of service (QoS) for more control and predictable performance
- Storage Replica, giving you synchronous storage replication for affordable business continuity and disaster recovery strategies
Security and Assurance: Protecting against today’s threats with a “zero-trust” approach to security that is rooted in the hardware.
- New Host Guardian Service, part of a trust and isolation boundary between the cloud infrastructure and guest OS layers
- Just Enough Administration to reduce the risk of security breaches by allowing users to perform only specific tasks
Management: Ongoing advances to simplify server management and increase consistency in approach.
- PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) for easier, consistent and faster deployment and updates.
- PowerShell Package Manager for unified package management and deployment
- Windows Management Framework 5.0 April Preview and DSC Resource Kit (available online simultaneously with TP2)
And much more, including new features for IIS, RDS, and AD such as:
- Conditional access control in AD FS, allows requiring a device compliant with policies to access resources
- Support for application authentication with OpenID Connect and OAuth, making it easier to build mobile enterprise applications
- Full OpenGL support with RDS for VDI scenarios
- Server-side support for HTTP/2 including header compression, connection multiplexing and server push.
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