New features in Windows Server 2012

Windows server 2012 has been released to the manufacturing. It will be available for general evaluation and purchase by all customers around the world on September 4 2012.

Here is the information on some of the new features in Windows Server 2012:-

Licensing

The Enterprise Licensing has been eliminated. There are only 4 license types in Windows 2012.  

• Datacenter edition for highly-virtualized private cloud environments.
• Standard edition for non-virtualized or lightly virtualized environments.
• Essentials edition for small businesses with up to 25 users running on servers with up to two processors.
• Foundation edition for small businesses with up to 15 users running on single processor servers.

Here is a comparison of various editions by server role.

Here is a summary of key features:-

Running instances

Running instances can exist either in a physical operating system environment (POSE) or a virtual operating system environment (VOSE).

Powershell

Windows Powershell has over 2300 commandlets as compared to 200 in Windows Server 2008

Task Manager

New Task Manager Window, shows more detailed information about each process/application

File System

New type of file system for File servers is called ReFS (Resilient File System). Max file size of 16 Exabytes and max volume size of 1 yottabytes (hardware restrictions still apply)

CPU and Memory limits

· There is no support for Itanium based processors
· Max logical processors: 640 (It was 256 in Windows Server 2008 R2)
· Max RAM: 4 TB (It was 2 TB in Windows Server 2008 R2)

Some new RDS features

a) Single Sign-On:  In Windows Server 2008 R2, it was possible to configure an RDS deployment so that users will need to enter their credentials only once when connecting to RemoteApps and hosted desktops. However, this configuration was very cumbersome. Windows Server 2012 dramatically simplified this by eliminating the need to use multiple certificates. It is also possible to use locally logged on domain credentials so that users connecting from managed devices can connect seamlessly without any credential prompts.
b) Email and web discovery of Remote Applications and desktops:  Users now can find the correct remote workspace to connect to by just providing their email address. This removes the requirement to remember a long website URL. In addition, Remote Desktop Web Access now supports other browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.