Product: Windows Server 2012 Company: Microsoft Website: http://www.microsoft.com MSRP: See Pricing Review By: Andre Da Costa with Robert Stein contributing

Support for 4 KB sector disks

Windows Server 2012 now includes support for large-sector disks. These disks represent the newest trend in the storage industry whereby the old 512-byte sector format is being replaced by the new 4,096-byte (4 KB) format to meet demand for increased disk capacity. Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 now supports hosting VHD fi les on disks that have either the native 4-KB format or the transitional 512-byte emulation (512e) mode.

Dynamic Memory improvements

Dynamic Memory was introduced for Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 as a way of enabling virtualization hosts to make more effective use of physical memory allocated to VMs running on the host. Dynamic Memory works by adjusting the amount of memory available to the VM in real time. These adjustments in memory allocation are based on how much memory the VM needs and on how Dynamic Memory has been configured on the VM. Dynamic Memory provides important scalability and performance benefits, especially for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments, where at any given time, a subset of the VMs running on the host tend either to be idle or to have a relatively low load. By using Dynamic Memory in such scenarios, you can consolidate greater numbers of VM on your Hyper-V hosts. The result is that you’ll need fewer hosts for provisioning virtual desktops to your user population, which means you won’t need to procure as much high-end server hardware. In other words, Dynamic Memory can help you save money.

PowerShell 3.0

PowerShell has become the de facto platform for automating the administration of Windows- based environments. Built on top of the common language runtime (CLR) and the Microsoft .NET Framework, PowerShell has brought a whole new paradigm to how computers running Windows are configured and managed in enterprise environments. A new version 3.0 of PowerShell is now included in Windows Server 2012. PowerShell 3.0 is built upon the Windows Management Framework 3.0, which includes a new WMI provider model that reduces dependency on COM, a new API for performing standard Common Information Model (CIM) operations, and the capability of writing new PowerShell cmdlets in native code. Windows Management Framework 3.0 also includes improvements that make WinRM connections more robust so they can support long-running tasks and be more resilient against transient network failure.

PowerShell 3.0 includes many new features that bring added flexibility and power for managing cloud and multiserver environments.

Storage Spaces - Storage Spaces is a new storage management technology exclusive to Windows 8. Storage Spaces simplifies adding additional storage to your computer while sharing some of the characteristics of RAID like redundancy. Storage Spaces utilizes the ReFS (Resilient File System). Storage Spaces created in Windows 8 are not backward compatible with Windows 7.

ReFS (Resilient File System) - ReFS is a newly engineered file system. ReFS, (which stands for Resilient File System), is built on the foundations of NTFS.

• Metadata integrity with checksums.

• Integrity streams providing optional user data integrity.

• Allocate on write transactional model for robust disk updates (also known as copy on write).

• Large volume, file and directory sizes.

• Storage pooling and virtualization makes file system creation and management easy

• Data striping for performance (bandwidth can be managed) and redundancy for fault tolerance.

• Disk scrubbing for protection against latent disk errors.

• Resiliency to corruptions with "salvage" for maximum volume availability in all cases.

• Shared storage pools across machines for additional failure tolerance and load balancing.

Support for Larger Disk  -

• Introduce new and enhance existing API to better enable applications to query for the physical sector size of a disk.

• Enhancing large-sector awareness within the NTFS file system, including ensuring appropriate sector padding when performing extending writes (writing to the end of the file).

• Incorporating large-sector awareness in the new VHDx file format used by Hyper-V to fully support both types of AF disks.

• Enhancing the Windows boot code to work correctly when booting from 4K native disks.

 

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