Ebook Whats New in Windows Server 12

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview
Mike Resseler
Veeam Product Strategy Specialist, MVP, Microsoft Certified IT Professional, MCSA, MCTS, MCP
Modern Data Protection

Built for Virtualization
August 2013
Contents
Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 The era of the cloud OS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Transform the datacenter .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Scalable and elastic .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Shared resources. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Automation and self-service. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Enable modern business applications. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Empower people-centric IT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Unlock insights on any data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Final thoughts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Disclaimer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Chapter 1: File services and storage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Work Folders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 SMB. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Automatic rebalancing of Scale-Out File Server clients.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13 Improved performance of SMB direct. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Improved SMB event messages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 VHDX files as shared storage for guest clustering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Hyper-V Live Migration over SMB. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 SMB bandwidth management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Support for multiple SMB instances on a Scale-Out File Server .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 SMB 1.0 is an option .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 DFS Namespace and DFS Replication. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Windows PowerShell module for DFS Replication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 DFS Replication WMI provider. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Database cloning for initial sync . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Database corruption recovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Cross-file RDC disable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 File staging tuning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Preserved file restoration .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Unexpected shutdown database recovery improvements .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Membership disabling improvement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 iSCSI Target server .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Virtual Disks enhancements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Manageability enhancements .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Improved optimization to allow disk-level caching. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .18 Scalability limits.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Local mount functionality. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Storage spaces. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Tiered Storage spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Write-back caching.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Flexible resiliency options. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Data Deduplication. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 VDI support. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Chapter 2: Networking. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 DHCP. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 DNS registration enhancements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 DNS PTR registration options. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Updated Windows PowerShell cmdlets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 DNS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Enhanced zone level statistics .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Enhanced DNSSEC support.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Enhanced PowerShell support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
IPAM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Role based access control. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Virtual address space management .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 External database support .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Upgrade and migration support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Enhanced Windows PowerShell support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Hyper-V Virtual Switch. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Hyper-V Virtual Switch extended port ACLs .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Hyper-V Network Virtualization coexists with third party forwarding extensions for the Hyper-V Virtual Switch. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Traffic bottlenecks to VMs are reduced with vRSS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Network tracing is streamlined and provides more detail .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Windows Server Gateway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Chapter 3: Clustering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Shared Virtual Hard Disk. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Virtual Machine drain on shutdown .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Virtual Machine network health detection. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 CSV improvements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Optimized CSV placement policies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Increased CSV resiliency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 CSV Cache allocation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 CSV diagnosibility. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 CSV interoperability. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Less dependency on AD .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Quorum improvements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Dynamic witness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Quorum user interface improvements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Force quorum resiliency .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Tie breaker for 50% node split. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Configure the global update manager mode .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Cluster node health detection .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Turn off IPsec encryption for inter-node cluster communication. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Cluster dashboard. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Chapter 4: Hyper-V. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Shared virtual hard disk. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Resizing virtual hard disks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Storage Quality of Service. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Live migrations .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Virtual Machine generation.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Integration Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Export . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Failover Clustering and Hyper-V. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Enhanced session mode .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Hyper-V Replica. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Linux support. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Management. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Automatic Virtual Machine Activation.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Session shadowing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Online storage deduplication. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 Improved RemoteApp behavior. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Quick reconnect for remote desktop clients . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Improved compression and bandwidth usage .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 Dynamic display handling. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 RemoteFx virtualized GPU supports DX11.1 .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
Chapter 6: Windows PowerShell. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Windows PowerShell Desired State Configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Save-help . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Windows PowerShell debugger. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 More updates .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 Windows PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 Windows PowerShell workflow. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 Windows PowerShell web services .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Windows PowerShell web access. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Windows PowerShell 4.0 bug fixes.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Chapter 7: Windows Deployment Services .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Chapter 8: Directory services & security .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Single Sign-On.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Work from anywhere . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Multi-factor authentication. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Multi-factor access control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 OAuth 2.0 support .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Security. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Group Policy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 IPv6 Support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Policy caching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Event logging .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Chapter 9: Features that are removed or deprecated. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Chapter 10: Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 Thanks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
Appendix A: References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Chapter 1 references .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Chapter 2 references .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Chapter 3 references .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Chapter 4 references .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Chapter 5 references .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Chapter 6 references .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 Chapter 7 references .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 Chapter 8 references .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
Introduction
Windows Server 2012 hasnt been out too long and its successor is already in preview mode. While many people say that this is just a service pack, it is a full featured R2 release. Windows Server 2012 R2 continues to build on the innovations that came with Windows Server 2012, and adds many improvements and new features to Windows Server 2012. This e-book will allow you to quickly discover the improvements and new features in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview. Note: *** It is important to know that this book is based on the preview edition of Windows Server 2012 R2 and therefore is still subject to change. Before we dive into the different topics, it is important that you understand the philosophy that came with the release of Windows Server 2012.
The era of the cloud OS

Microsoft calls Windows Server 2012 the first real cloud Operating System. Lets forget about the marketing term for a second and look at what that really means. Windows Server 2012 has been built with the cloud in mind. Windows Server 2012 provides a common architecture to develop, deploy and manage applications on your own private cloud, hybrid clouds and public clouds. Microsofts Windows Server 2012 focuses on four key areas: Transform the datacenter Enable modern business applications Empower people-centric IT Unlock insights on any data
Transform the datacenter

Scalability, elastic and extensible are the keywords in this area. By building a datacenter that is consistent with public cloud platforms and work with common tools across that datacenter, service provider clouds and Windows Azure will leverage your investments into your IT. Scalable and elastic Whether you are running one Virtual Machine or a few thousand, the architecture that you design needs to be able to scale out as your business or workload demands. The improvements capable in this Operating System give you the possibility to architect a solution for your environment that can scale quickly and efficiently.
Shared resources Those of us who have been in the IT world for a while will remember the days when servers were assigned to a specific workload or a specific business unit. Virtualization has changed that idea a bit, but we still keep thinking in terms of servers. There are still many companies out there that will give specific servers to business units or workloads even though they are already running Virtual Machines on those servers. By starting to adapt the concept of shared resources, you are not going to give servers anymore but deploy compute (e.g. cpu & memory), networking and storage to workloads or business units. In Microsoft terms, this is called fabrics. This allows for multi-tenancy on the same physical fabrics and a better use of your resources. With virtual networking inside the box, this can offer you new possibilities and save on costs at the same time Automation and self-service Self-provisioning is another important area in the cloud era. Windows Server 2012 comes with more than 2,400 PowerShell cmdlets. In combination with System Center 2012, you have valuable management tools to automate and offer self-service to your end-users or customers. The fact that those work over the different clouds means less investments on your side.
Enable modern business applications

The time when an application only worked on your business workstation or laptop is over. Today, users demand their applications on a range of devices and they should be able to access the application at any time, wherever they are.
Empower people-centric IT
Supporting many devices and applications can be extremely difficult for the IT department. Not only the 24/7 management, but also knowing all those different devices and applications can be a real burden. Security is also a major risk in this area with all your corporate data being spread around different devices. Windows Server 2012 is built to answer those problems. And R2, as you will read later on, continues that direction and goes even further with new features.
Unlock insights on any data

Big data requires robust BI tools. Microsoft is focusing on Business Intelligence tools such as the upcoming SQL Server. This is, however, a topic that wont be touched on in this book, but note that it requires a welldesigned infrastructure to deliver Business Intelligence with the needed tools to your company.
Final thoughts
Windows Server 2012 introduced industry sweeping changes to the way we think about Operating Systems, storage, Hyper-V, networking, and clouds. Windows Server 2012 R2 continues on that path and adds many more improvements and features to the cloud OS vision.
Disclaimer
Many of the information in this eBook comes from the TechNet documentation for Windows Server 2012 R2 and includes my own thoughts and experiences with the technology so far. The technology is still in Preview mode and is subject to change before it will hit General Availability (GA) . This book is not meant to be a technology reference book, its meant to help you explore the new capabilities, features and improvements of Windows Server 2012 R2 with the current preview. We will also see that during the coming months, new functionality or other enhancements will pop-up that are not described in this eBook. Microsoft can change the product and remove or add functionality until GA. This doesnt mean that you dont need to start learning today.
10
Chapter 1: File services and storage

Windows Server 2012 already contained a lot of improvements in the file services and storage areas. Items such as Data Deduplication, iSCSI Target Server, Storage Spaces and storage pools and more have brought a whole new set of features to the Operating System that gave us many possibilities in our datacenter architectures. Windows Server R2 introduces Server Message Block (SMB), DFS Namespaces, DFS Replication, iSCSI Target Server updates and Work Folders.
Work Folders
We discussed the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) principle in the introduction. Most of us are aware that this is a trend that wont go away and one we need to address. On one hand, we want to give our endusers the flexibility to let them work from anywhere on every device they own. On the other hand, we need to be able to make sure that the data is kept under our control and that there are no leaks when the data is spread around different devices. Microsoft focuses heavily on People-Centric IT (PCIT) which is a huge pillar in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview. One of these capabilities in that scenario is Work Folders. Work Folders are a capability that will give end-users the ability to sync their work data on all of their devices. The best way to describe it is to compare it with Dropbox (I know, this is not entirely correct but it gives non-IT people a better idea). Work Folders can sync work data and company policy compliance, and most importantly, it solves your security questions. What are the capabilities of Work Folders? S ingle Point of Access to work files on PCs and devices (support for Windows 7, iPad and more is not yet foreseen for GA but will come eventually) A ccess your files when offline and let them sync to the central file server when there is internet or network connectivity D ata encryption in transit but also on all of the devices that the data resides on. And of course, the possibility to wipe the corporate data (and only that data!) through Windows Intune File classification and folder quota is supported Specific security policies can be enforced (like encryption and lock screen password) High-availability possibilities One of the questions I got was how to compare this to Skydrive and Skydrive PRO. That is of course a good question, and I found the answer on a technet blogpost: http://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/ archive/2013/07/10/introducing-work-folders-on-windows-server-2012-r2.aspx
11
Consumer / personal data SkyDrive SkyDrive Pro Work Folders Folder Redirection / Client-Side Caching
Individual work data
Team / group work data
Personal devices
Access protocol HTTPS HTTPS HTTPS SMB (only from on-prem or using VPN)
Data location Public cloud SharePoint / Oce 365 File server
File server
Table 1: Work Folders / Skydrive / Redirection comparison
As you can see, it looks like SkyDrive Pro has more functionality (today), but the main difference lies in the fact that the data is stored on a file server while SkyDrive Pro syncs the data through SharePoint or Office 365. Lets have a look at the technical side of things. In order to work with Work Folders, you must have the following requirements on the server side (taken from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn265974.aspx): Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview for hosting sync shares and user files A volume formatted with NTFS file system A server certificate from a Certification Authority (CA) that is trusted by your users A reverse proxy or network gateway to make the server accessible from the internet A registered domain name (like workfolders.contoso.com or something) O ptional: An Active Directory Domain Services forest with the Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview schema extensions to support automatically referring client PCs and devices to the correct sync server when using multiple sync servers O ptional: Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) infrastructure, when using AD FS authentication On the client side, you need the following: Windows 8.1 Preview Windows RT 8.1 Preview Enough free space on a NTFS volume to save your work data. (Work Folders use %USERPROFILE%\ Work Folders as the default location. This can be changed during the setup) 12
And as I said, eventually Windows 7, iPads and other devices will be supported also.
Figure 1: Work Folders as a role in Windows Server 2012 R2
SMB
Server Message Block (SMB) is a network file sharing protocol that allows applications to read and write to files (or other resources) on a remote server. SMB 3.0 is a huge improvement in Windows Server 2012 and opened many new possibilities for the IT administrator. More information can be found at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831795.aspx. In the Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview, new and updated features/functionality were released. Automatic rebalancing of Scale-Out File Server clients. This is a new feature. SMB client connections are tracked per-file share and clients are redirected to the cluster node with the best access to that volume (where the file share resides on). The efficiency gain here is that there will be less redirection traffic between the different file server nodes. Improved performance of SMB direct SMB direct (or SMB over RDMA) has improved performance for small I/O workloads. That improvement will be obvious when using high-speed network interfaces such as 40 Gbps Ethernet or 56 Gbps InfiniBand. More information about SMB direct can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ jj134210.aspx
13
Improved SMB event messages SMB already has event messages, but in Windows Server 2012 R2, those events now contain more detailed and helpful information. By default, the most relevant event channels are turned on to give you all the necessary information, and events now include details on configuration and troubleshooting solutions. VHDX files as shared storage for guest clustering With the introduction of guest clustering or Virtual Machine clustering, there is also the support for VHDX files as shared storage on SMB Scale-Out file shares. This is discussed in more detail in Chapter 4: Hyper-V. Hyper-V Live Migration over SMB. Live Migration has received some improvements and new features (see Chapter 4: Hyper-V for more information). One of those new features is the possibility to use SMB 3.0 as your transport protocol for Live Migrations. If your infrastructure is taking advantage from technologies such as SMB Direct and SMB Multichannel, you will get highspeed migration with low CPU utilization. SMB bandwidth management Depending on the workload you are sending over a specific SMB channel (or channels), you can configure SMB bandwidth limits. There are three types: Default, LiveMigration and Virtual Machine Support for multiple SMB instances on a Scale-Out File Server A new feature in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview: On each cluster node, you will be able to provide additional instances in Scale-Out File servers. You can have a default instance that handles the incoming traffic for SMB clients and another one that handles inter-node CSV traffic. SMB 1.0 is an option SMB 1.0. which includes the legacy computer browser service and Remote Administration protocol, is separated in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview. They are still on by default, but if your environment doesnt have older SMB clients anymore (XP, Windows Server 2003) you can remove those features. Why would you want to do that? To increase security and reduce patching. You can remove it through the Remove Roles and Features Wizard
14
Figure 2: Removing SMB 1.0
DFS Namespace and DFS Replication

DFS Replication is a role service in the File and Storage Services role. It replicates folders across multiple servers and sites. The DFS Replication service uses a compression algorithm called remote differential compression (RDC). RDC is responsible for detecting changes to the data in a specific file and then it replicates only the changed file blocks instead of the entire file. For more information on DFS Namespaces and DFS Replication: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/ library/jj127250.aspx Windows Server 2012 R2 brings some enhancements and new features to DFS. Windows PowerShell module for DFS Replication A new feature in Windows Server 2012 R2 is that you now have Windows PowerShell cmdlets for performing your administrative tasks. Having a Windows PowerShell module for DFS Replication is very important when you are automating things in your environment. Common administration tasks dont need to be done anymore by using command-line tools, but can be done through PowerShell scripts. This includes existing actions such as creating, modifying and removing replication settings, but also new functionality such as database cloning and preserved-file restoration. You can see all the commands available by using Get-Command Module *DFS*
1. RDC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_Differential_Compression
15
Figure 3: PowerShell cmdlets for DFS
DFS Replication WMI provider Windows Server 2012 R2 includes a new Windows Management Infrastructure. This gives programmatic access to manage DFS replication and therefore it means that management programs can use this to manage DFS Replication. On top of that, this management can run over the Windows Remote Management (WinRM) transport protocol. For older management solutions, there is still WMIv1 that remains in the product for backwards compatibility. Database cloning for initial sync Database cloning gives you the opportunity to bypass initial replication when you create new replicated folders or change server or recover from disaster. That means that you will be able to pre-seed replicated files and import the cloned database from one server to another (or multiple). The advantage of this is that you dont have that pre-seeding data anymore over the network which could (and will) result in saving a lot of time. Database corruption recovery Database corruption recovery is something that will lead to many smiles with IT administrators that use DFS functionality. This feature will rebuild the database when it detects database corruption and then resume replication normally. This means that the initial replication or sync process doesnt have to be done again. Cross-file RDC disable DFS replication always enables cross-file Remote Differential Compression (RDC). Now you can choose to disable this which can lead to performance improvements for replication servers on LANs, but this will also increase the bandwidth usage and therefore is not a good option over the WAN.
2. For further reference: This is the new version of WMI most of the time called WMI v2 3. WinRM: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa384426(v=vs.85).aspx
16
File staging tuning In previous Operating Systems, DFS Replication always used a hard-coded 256KB file size to determine the staging requirements. Now you can choose your file staging size from 256KB to 512TB depending on your needs to increase performance (but loose on bandwidth usage again). Preserved file restoration When you have files that are in the hidden DFSR private folders (ConflictAndDeleted and PreExisting folders) you had no possibility to recover those files. In R2, you can retrieve those by using the GetDfsPreservedFiles and Restore-DfsrPreservedFiles cmdlets Unexpected shutdown database recovery improvements This is an updated feature that enables automatic recovery after an unexpected stopping of the DFS Replication service. Membership disabling improvement This improvement stops the DFS Replication private folder cleanup when disabling a servers membership in a replicated folder. Since it leaves the DfsrPrivate folder untouched, it means you can recover conflicted, deleted and preexisting files from that location as long as you dont re-enable the membership.
iSCSI Target server

iSCSI Target made its debut as a free download for Windows 2008 R2 in 2011. In Windows Server 2012, it didnt need to be downloaded anymore since it came as a built-in feature. iSCSI Target allows Windows Server to share block storage remotely. The nice thing about iSCSI is that it leverages the Ethernet network and doesnt require additional or specialized hardware. iSCSI Target server is ideal for the following: Network and diskless boot Server Application storage Heterogeneous storage Development, test, demo and lab environments Below are the differences between iSCSI Target server in Windows Server 2012 and R2 Preview Virtual Disks enhancements This is a new feature. The data persistence layer is redesigned based on the VHDX format. VHDX has a much larger storage capacity compared to VHD. iSCSI Target server provides data corruption protection during failures and will optimize the structural alignments of dynamic and differencing disks to prevent performance degradation on large-sector physical disks.
17
Manageability enhancements Windows Server 2012 R2 offers updated manageability enhancements in this area. Using the SMI-S provider in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview with System Center Virtual Machine Manager will now allow you to manage iSCSI Target server in a hosted and/or private cloud. New PowerShell cmdlets are there also. For more information on the different cmdlets: Get-Command Module *iSCSI* Improved optimization to allow disk-level caching Another improved feature: iSCSI Target server now sets the disk cache bypass flag on a hosting disk I/O, through Force Unit Access (FUA), only when the issuing initiator explicitly requests it. This change can potentially improve performance. Previously, iSCSI Target server would always set the disk cache bypass flag on all I/Os. System cache bypass functionality remains unchanged in iSCSI Target server; for instance, the file system cache on the target server is always bypassed. Scalability limits For those among us that hit the iSCSI Target limits, these are now increased. The maximum number of sessions per target server is increased to 544 and the maximum number of logical units per target server is increased to 256. Local mount functionality This is actually a feature that is deprecated. In Windows Server 2012 R2 you wont be able to locally mount snapshots anymore. As a workaround, you can use the local iSCSI initiator on the target server computer (this is also called the loopback initiator) to access the exported snapshots.
Storage spaces
In Windows Server 2012 R2 the concept of storage spaces is introduced. This technology allows you to bring together some physical disks and build virtual disks on top of that. For smaller shops, this technology offers a cheap way to create shared storage. A lot of interest went to that solution because in the end, it kind of does exactly the same thing Storage Area Networks (SAN) do. It actually is a bit more flexible compared to a SAN. Storage spaces are one of these features that drew a lot of attention when it was released with Windows Server 2012. And in Windows Server 2012 R2, Im pretty sure that the latest improvements will draw even more attention. Below is a slide that shows the similarity with traditional storage.
18
Figure 4: Storage spaces comparison. Source: TechEd NA 2013: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/MDC-B218#fbid=p6SGjtG757M
Lets look at the new features. Tiered Storage spaces Tiered Storage is a feature that you only find in the high-end storage market, and with Windows Server 2012 R2, its available to you in the box. Now you can create a storage space by mixing fast disks and slower disks. This will provide you with a much bigger capacity and yet youll still have performance on the fast disks. Based on the analysis that the storage space will do, by default at 1 a.m., it will place commonly used parts of files (or databases, also known as hot blocks) on the fast tier and the rarely used parts (cold blocks) on the capacity tier (the slower disks). And that is fully automated. Of course it provides you with the flexibility to place certain files on the fast tier if you want to and if there is a use case such as a VDI deployment. Write-back caching Windows Server 2012 R2 can leverage one of those fast-tier disks to tackle a large write activity. Hyper-V (and other services) require write-through to make sure that there is no data loss, but this leads to reduced write performance, especially when there is a lot of write activity. By leveraging the fast-tier storage, the performance can be improved while the optimization task (see above) will take the cold blocks to the slower storage.
4. Write-through: Writes go straight to disk and to the cache. This method prevents data loss, but every write operation is done twice, reducing performance.
19
Flexible resiliency options This already existed with Windows Server 2012 but is now enhanced with some new possibilities. Storage spaces work with a software RAID engine. It works by spreading the data and parity information across all drives in a specific storage space. Now there is double parity that uses a Microsoft Research algorithm to rebuild with less I/O compared to the standard Reed-Solomon Raid 6. There is also support for new SAS JBODs with expanders and enclosure services. Windows servers will be aware of events inside that enclosure (think temperature for example).
Data Deduplication
Data Deduplication is a feature that was introduced in Windows Server 2012 and can greatly reduce your storage costs. Data Deduplication is an answer for IT pain points such as: Rapid growth in file data Rising storage total cost of ownership Data consolidation Workforce decentralization It uses a chunking algorithm with a post-processing approach, and many of the policies can be adjusted. Its very easy to install. You only need to add it as a feature to your server
Figure 5: Adding Data Deduplication as a role in Windows Server
20
After enabling the role, you can choose your volumes where you want to enable Data Deduplication (not on the boot volume, and the volume must be NTFS formatted). More information about Data Deduplication can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/ library/hh831602.aspx VDI support Data Deduplication supports live VHDs for VDI in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview. This is a great enhancement and will save a lot of storage in VDI deployments. Of course, there is the fear that it will reduce the performance of your VDIs, but the opposite is true in this case. Because of the caching mechanism in Data Deduplication, the speed of the boot times can increase. The server can copy the bits from the first VHD booted to its cache and every other VHD booted will profit from that. Adding support for VDI also means a few other things
Figure 6: Additional features in Data Deduplication, source TechEd NA
CSV volumes are now supported which wasnt the case in Windows Server 2012. Open files couldnt be optimized before but now it is possible. And under the hood, there has been a lot of work to improve the optimization and read/write performance.
21
Chapter 2: Networking
Windows Server 2012 released some very good improvements to the networking stack and Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview continues in that direction. Networking is more than cabling and switches. It is protocol and services as well.
DHCP
DHCP is a service that allows you to automatically assign IP-addresses in a TCP/IP based network to hosts such as servers and workstations. Every server or workstation that wants to receive an IP-address needs to have a DHCP client to receive an IP. DHCP received a major overhaul in Windows Server 2012 and introduced a few enhancements that previously were only possible with very expensive tooling. Features such as DHCP failover and policy-based assignment have become very popular in IT organizations. Combined with the PowerShell module for DHCP server, this role has grown in its usefulness to many organizations. Windows Server 2012 R2 adds two new features and one improvement. DNS registration enhancements Your DHCP policies have been extended so that you now can create conditions based on the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) of clients. But now, your DHCP policies can also be configured to register DHCP clients using a specific DNS suffix, overriding the DNS suffix that is used on the client. If you use suitable FQDN-based conditions and DNS suffix, then you can receive full control of DNS registrations and devices on your network, including workgroup computers, guest devices or clients with a specific attribute
Figure 7: DHCP Policy based on FQDN
22
Figure 8: Policy properties with alternative DNS Suffix
DNS PTR registration options Now you have the possibility to register resource records of DHCP clients with the DNS server. This avoids failures from attempts to register pointer (PTR) resource records when there is not a reverse lookup zone. This can be done for all clients, or for clients on a specified subnet or with a specified attribute.
Figure 9: Disable dynamic updates for DNS PTR records
23
Updated Windows PowerShell cmdlets Windows Server 2012 already had a DHCP module. Within the 2012 R2 Preview, a lot of new and improved cmdlets are introduced. When you run the cmdlet, Get-Command Module DHCPServer, you will get all the commands that you can use.
Figure 10: DHCP cmdlets
Below is a table with the new and updated cmdlets (From: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn305900.aspx) New or improved New New New
Cmdlet name Add-DhcpServerSecurityGroup Add-DhcpServerv4MulticastExclusionRange Add-DhcpServerv4MulticastScope
Description Adds security groups to a DHCP server. Adds a range of addresses to exclude from a multicast scope. Adds a multicast scope on the DHCP server. Adds a new policy either at the server level or at the scope level. This cmdlet can now be used to specify lease duration and also add FQDN-based policies. Gets an account that the DHCP Server service uses to register or deregister client records on a DNS server. This cmdlet can now be used to display DNS settings of DHCP policies. 24
Add-DhcpServerv4Policy
Improved
Get-DhcpServerDnsCredential Get-DhcpServerv4DnsSetting
New Improved
Get-DhcpServerv4MulticastExclusionRange Get-DhcpServerv4MulticastLease Get-DhcpServerv4MulticastScope Get-DhcpServerv4MulticastScopeStatistics Get-DhcpServerv4SuperscopeStatistics Remove-DhcpServerDnsCredential
New New New New New New
Retrieves the exclusion range for a specied multicast scope. Retrieves multicast leases for a specied scope name. Gets multicast scope objects. Gets multicast scope statistics. Returns statistics for superscopes. Removes the credential that the DHCP Server service uses to register or deregister client records on a DNS server. Removes a range of addresses previously excluded from a multicast scope. Removes one or more multicast scope leases for a specied multicast scope or IP address. Removes multicast scopes. Renames a superscope. Reconciles inconsistent lease records in the DHCP database. Sets credentials that the DHCP Server service uses to register or deregister client records on a DNS server. Congures how the Dynamic Host Conguration Protocol (DHCP) server service updates the DNS server with the client-related information. Ths cmdlet can now be used to set the DNS settings of policies. Modies the attributes of an existing failover relationship. This cmdlet can now be used to change the mode of a failover relationship. Modies the properties of a multicast scope. Sets the properties of an existing policy either at the server level or at the specied scope level. This cmdlet can now be used to set lease duration of a policy and also modify FQDN-based policies.
Remove-DhcpServerv4MulticastExclusionRange Remove-DhcpServerv4MulticastLease Remove-DhcpServerv4MulticastScope Rename-DhcpServerv4Superscope Repair-DhcpServerv4IPRecord Set-DhcpServerDnsCredential
New New New New New New
Set-DhcpServerv4DnsSetting
Improved
Set-DhcpServerv4Failover
Improved
Set-DhcpServerv4MulticastScope
New
Set-DhcpServerv4Policy
Improved
25
DNS
DNS, or Domain Name System, is used in TCP/IP networks for naming computers and network services. In general, when a user connects to a server or service which he knows through a friendly-name, the DNS service will translate that friendly-name to an IP-address. In Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview, there are no new features introduced but there are a few enhancements made to the existing features. Enhanced zone level statistics In Windows Server 2012, there are already some statistics available. By using the GetDnsServerStatistics cmdlet, you are able to get statistics such as CacheStatistics, DatabaseStatistics, DnssecStatistics, DsStatistics, ErrorStatistics, MasterStatistics, MemoryStatistics, NetBiosStatistics, PacketStatistics, PrivateStatistics, Query2Statistics, QueryStatistics, RecordStatistics, RecursionStatistics, SecondaryStatistics, SecurityStatistics, TimeoutStatistics, TimeStatistics, UpdateStatistics and WinsStatistics.
Figure 11: DNS statistics
26
Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview adds new statistics to this cmdlet and will give you more information about (from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn305898.aspx): ZoneQueryStatistics QueriesFailure: The number of queries that did not result in a successful response, for example when the response is DNS SERVER FAILURE. Q ueriesNameError: The number of queries that resulted in an NXDOMAIN or EMPTY AUTH response. QueriesReceived: The total number of queries received for the specified record type. QueriesResponded: The total number of queries that resulted in a valid DNS response. ZoneTranserStatistics R equestReceived: The total number of zone transfer requests received by the DNS Server service when operating as a primary server for a specific zone. R equestSent: The total number of zone transfer requests sent by the DNS Server service when operating as a secondary server for a specific zone. R esponseReceived: The total number of zone transfer requests received by the DNS Server service when operating as a secondary server for a specific zone. S uccessReceived: The total number of zone transfers received by the DNS Server service when operating as a secondary server for a specific zone. S uccessSent: The total number of zone transfers successfully sent by the DNS Server service when operating as a primary server for a specific zone. ZoneUpdateStatistics D ynamicUpdateReceived: The total number of dynamic update requests received by theDNS server. DynamicUpdateRejected: The total number of dynamic updates rejected by the DNSserver. You can receive these statistics by opening an elevated command prompt and use the GETDnsServerStatistics ZoneName <zonename> cmdlet
27
Figure 12: DNS Zone Statistics
Enhanced DNSSEC support Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) is a suite of extensions that adds security to the DNS protocol. DNSSEC uses digital signatures and cryptographic keys to validate that DNS responses are authentic. There are a few changes for DNSSEC in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview. (http://technet.microsoft.com/ en-us/library/dn305898.aspx) T here is a new role introduced called the Key Master role that is intended for file-backed multimaster zones. That key already existed in Windows Server 2012 for Active-Directory integrated zones. This key is responsible for generating and signing keys for zones that are protected with DNSSEC. T he key management process is now isolated from primary DNS servers that are not the key masters of a zone. Enhanced PowerShell support There are three new cmdlets that are introduced for DNS in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview: Step-DnsSererSigningKeyRollover Add-DnsServerTrustAnchor Root RootTrustAnchorsUrl
5. For more information on DNSSEC: http://technet.microsoft.com/library/jj200221.aspx
28
IPAM
In Windows Server 2012, there was the introduction of a new feature called IP Address Management (IPAM). This was one of those features that drew my attention very quickly. Not only because it was completely new, but more because IP Management is one of the most difficult items to manage in an environment. Ask any administrator out there and he or she will mention this as one of their top 10 difficulties in management. There are very good software solutions out there that address these problems. The problem (as always) is the price of these solutions. When Microsoft released IPAM, they released basic IP Management for the IT administrator in environments where expensive solutions arent an option. The first version of IPAM was pretty basic but showed some serious potential. The second version adds a lot of new and improved functionality. Lets have a look at them. Role based access control In the R2 preview, you can start building access control in IPAM, which wasnt possible before. By using roles, access scopes and access policies, you can manage control to IPAM. In larger environments or in companies with different locations, this can become very helpful and IT administrators will be able to delegate work to local divisions or to other units in their company. By default, there are eight roles defined, each with specific rights. But you can easily define your own role and start mixing rights according to your needs.
Figure 13: IPAM - Default Roles
When you create a new user role, you need to scope the different rights that range from DHCP server operations, DHCP scope operations, IP address space operations, DNS zone operations and many more
29
Figure 14: IPAM - Scoping a user role
An access scope determines the objects that a user has access to. Basically, you use this to define administrative domains. Access scopes can be based on geographical locations or maybe to specific silos in your environment (dev/test/production domains). Creating an access scope is simply filling in a name and a description. The scope will then be used in a policy.
Figure 15: Defining an Access Scope
Now that we have defined a new Access Scope, we can place them at specific servers or roles.
30
Figure 16: Setting an access scope to a server
Access Policies combine the scope and the role and then assign that permission to a user or a group.
Figure 17: IPAM - Access Policy
31
Virtual address space management With the release of System Center 2012, Virtual Machine Manager Administrators learned about virtual networks and the management of a network as a fabric. With the upcoming Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2 and Windows Server 2012 R2, those two will be integrated and IPAM will offer administrators the possibility to manage end-to-end their entire IP address space throughout Microsoft powered clouds. The IPAM server will enable you to detect and prevent IP address space conflicts, duplicates and more. Enhanced DHCP server management This feature existed in the first version of IPAM but there are many enhancements in the Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview.
Figure 18: IPAM - new operations for DHCP scope and servers
There are also new views for objects such as: DHCP Failover DHCP Policies DHCP superscopes DHCP filters DHCP reservations
32
Figure 19: IPAM - New Views
External database support Instead of only supporting a Windows Internal Database, administrators can now choose to store the IPAM data on a Microsoft SQL Server. This needs to be done during the provisioning process. Adding support for SQL server provides the possibility for administrators to build scalability, disaster recovery and reporting scenarios. Upgrade and migration support Because of the new DHCP features (see before) and all the new IPAM features, an upgrade from Windows Server 2012 to R2 can be a difficult process. Microsoft supports a seamlessly upgrade for Windows Server 2012 to 2012 R2 preview. Enhanced Windows PowerShell support 55 new Windows PowerShell cmdlets are available for IPAM in this preview. To view all commands for IPAM, use the following cmdlet: Get-Command Module IPAMserver
33
Figure 20: IPAM cmdlets
If you want to learn or demonstrate the IPAM possibilities, then you can use the lab setup as described in the following TechNet article: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn268503.aspx
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 or cloud environments. The Hyper-V Virtual Switch included new features for manageability, security, isolation, visibility and scalability. Windows Server 2012 R2 continues on that path and provides some additional features and updates to existing features.
34
Hyper-V Virtual Switch extended port ACLs Extended port ACLs already exist in Windows Server 2012. They allow you to provide firewall protection and enforce security policies for the tenant VMs in their datacenters. The new functionality exists out of the following: S ocket port number: Besides the source and destination, MAC, IP addresses for IPv4 and IPv6, you can now specify the port number also when you create rules Stateful rules. Configure stateful rules with a time-out parameter or make them unidirectional Dynamic Load Balancing of Network Traffic Windows Server 2012 provides simultaneous load distribution and failover within NIC teaming but it doesnt guarantee load distribution between the NICs. Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview makes sure that dynamic load balancing is done continuously and moves traffic streams between NICs (within a NIC team) automatically. Hyper-V Network Virtualization coexists with third party forwarding extensions for the Hyper-V Virtual Switch Network Virtualization in Windows Server 2012 uses Network Virtualization Generic Routing Encapsulation (NVGRE). With Windows Server 2012 R2, you now have the possibility to let third party forwarding extensions work together with NVGRE. Hyper-V Network Virtualization can forward packets to either the VM customer address (CA) space or the physical address space (PA). With hybrid forwarding, the network traffic that is encapsulated in NVGRE will be forwarded by the Hyper-V Network Virtualization module in the switch and all non-NVGRE network traffic will be forwarded by the third-party extensions that you installed. Besides the coexistence and the forwarding, third party forwarding extensions can apply specific policies such as ACLs and QoS to both the NVGRE and non-NVGRE traffic. Traffic bottlenecks to VMs are reduced with vRSS Windows Server supports Receive Side Scaling (RSS) over SR-IOV. Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview supports virtual RSS (vRSS) on the VM network path. This should improve guest networking because VMs sometimes have difficulties getting the 10Gbps throughput because of the processing load on a single CPU core. vRSS will tackle this problem by spreading the load across multiple cores on the host and on the VM. To use vRSS, your VMs need to be configured to use multiple cores and they need to support RSS. In that case, vRSS will be enabled automatically.
6. For more information on extended Port ACLs: http://technet.microsoft.com/library/jj679878.aspx#bkmk_portacls 7. For more information on NIC teaming: http://technet.microsoft.com/library/hh831648.aspx 8. NVGRE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVGRE 9. RSS: http://technet.microsoft.com/library/hh997036.aspx
35
Network tracing is streamlined and provides more detail You asked and Microsoft listened. Network traces will give you the switch and port configuration information and tracing packets through the Hyper-V Virtual Switch (and the extensions) and they will be much easier to read. More information can be found in the following documentation: Unified Tracing Overview: http://technet.microsoft.com/library/hh848933.aspx Netsh Commands for Network Trace: http://technet.microsoft.com/library/jj129382.aspx
Figure 21: Tracing with netsh
Windows Server Gateway

Windows Server Gateway (WSG) is a new feature. It is a Virtual Machine software router that allows network traffic routing between virtual and physical networks, including the internet. This technology enables the vision of Microsoft to combine on premise clouds with cloud service providers. The WSG will act upon Hyper-V Network Virtualization, which is introduced in Windows Server 2012. Virtual networks are created by using Hyper-V Network Virtualization and were introduced in Windows Server 2012. We already discussed this a bit before. If you are not familiar with the concept of Hyper-V Network Virtualization, read the following paragraph before continuing.
36
Hyper-V Network Virtualization brings you a Virtual Machine network that is independent of the underlying physical network. VM networks which can exist out of one or more virtual subnets are decoupled from the exact physical location of an IP subnet. That means that organizations can move their subnets to the cloud or to providers without the need of changing their IP addresses. They can keep their subnets and topology even if there are other tenants that have a similar topology in a same subnet. This is great technology and is certainly something you should investigate when you are looking at cloud possibilities. There is, however, one big issue with the technology in Windows Server 2012. It is extremely difficult to provide connectivity between the VMs on the virtual network and resources on physical networks which result in disconnection between the virtual subnets and the rest of the network. Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview allows you to deploy a WSG that will route the network traffic between the physical network and VM network resources. Windows Server Gateway provides the following additional functionality: Integration with Hyper-V Network Virtualization You can cluster WSG for high-availability More information on Windows Server Gateway can be found here (including a test lab guide): http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn313101.aspx
Chapter 3: Clustering
Clustering is something we have used for many years. Clustering provides automatic failover capabilities to mission critical workloads such as SQL, Exchange, Active Directory and Web Services. Here are the new improvements to clustering in Windows Server 2012:
Shared Virtual Hard Disk

Shared Virtual Hard Disk is something that isnt available in Windows Server 2012. With this feature you can use .vhdx files as shared storage for a Virtual Machine failover cluster. We dive deeper into this feature in Chapter 4: Hyper-V
Virtual Machine drain on shutdown

In Windows Server 2012, when you shut down a Hyper-V failover cluster node and placed that node into maintenance mode, then all the running clustered roles would be drained first. The problem seemed that the maintenance mode settings werent used all the time or simply forgotten. To avoid this, in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview, the cluster now automatically live migrates all running Virtual Machines to another host before the node shuts down. This feature will prevent unnecessary downtime when you forget to use the maintenance mode. While this is still the preferred way of working, it will avoid those little mistakes.
37
If you compare it on a technical level, then this is what happens: In Windows Server 2012, when shutting down the node without maintenance mode, all the VMs are placed into a saved state and then moved to another node and resumed. In Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview, instead of using saved state, the cluster live migrates all running VMs before shutdown. This feature will be on by default. If you want to change this, you need to change the DrainOnShutdown property. As always, use PowerShell to find out what your setting is: (Get-Cluster).DrainOnShutdown
Virtual Machine network health detection

A Hyper-V Failover cluster could think that everything is healthy while in reality there could be a VM or VMs that are suffering from network disconnection. When this happens in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview, the Virtual Machine will be automatically live-migrated to a node where that specific network is available. To be able to use this feature, your VM should be configured with the Protected network checkbox that can be found under the VM settings, network adapter, advanced features. By default this setting will be on but can be switched off in case you have a network attached to your Virtual Machine that is allowed to be dropped.
Figure 22: Protected Network checkbox
38
CSV improvements
There are significant improvements for a Cluster Shared Volume (CSV). A CSV is a shared disk with an NTFS volume that can be used by all the nodes in the failover cluster. Every node can read and write operations on that volume. More information on a CSV can be found here: http://technet.microsoft. com/en-us/library/jj612868.aspx Optimized CSV placement policies Whenever we talk about a failover cluster, we know that one node is the owner of a CSV. That owner (also referred to as the coordinator node) owns the physical disk resource (the LUN). All I/O operations for that LUN will be done through that coordinator node. In Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview, something called distributed ownership is introduced. This means that the CSV ownership will be balanced across different cluster nodes so that one specific node wont own a huge amount of CSVs. If that specific node fails, then the transition of the CSV ownership wont take as long and will be much more efficient. And besides that, if there is a failure and the ownership of the CSV changes, then there will be a new automatic rebalance. This happens with a CSV failover, a new node in the cluster, node rejoin, node restart and start of the failover cluster itself. Increased CSV resiliency There are two improvements for CSV resiliency. T here will be multiple server service instances per failover cluster node. This is already discussed in Support for multiple SMB instances on a Scale-Out File Server C SV Health monitoring: If the server service becomes unhealthy, it can impact the CSV coordinator node. Because of this, the node can have difficulties accepting I/O requests from other nodes and performing his work. In R2 Preview, when the server service gets unhealthy on a node, the CSV ownership will automatically transition to another node. CSV Cache allocation You have now the possibility to allocate a higher percentage of the physical memory to the CSV cache. This will improve the performance if more system memory is used as a write-through cache. In Windows Server 2012 you were able to allocate 20% of the memory. This is increased to 80%. Also important to note is that this cache is disabled by default in Windows Server 2012 but enabled by default in Windows Server 2012 R2. For more information on how to set the block cache and to enable/disable: http://technet.microsoft. com/en-us/library/jj612868.aspx#BKMK_cache Note that the csvEnableBlockCache property has been changed to EnableBlockCache
10. CSV: Cluster Shared Volume: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_Shared_Volumes
39
CSV diagnosibility Troubleshooting CSV per node is made easier with Windows Server 2012 R2. By using the GetClusterSharedVolumeState PowerShell cmdlet you can view the state information of the CSV including items such as direct or redirected mode and the reason for the redirection. CSV interoperability This comes back to other enhancements in other technologies that have already been discussed (or will be discussed furthermore throughout this book). CSV has been enhanced to support features such as: ReFS (Resilient File System) Data Deduplication Parity storage spaces Tiered storage spaces Storage spaces write-back caching
Less dependency on AD
Deploying a failover cluster without dependencies in Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) for network names is now possible. This means that you can deploy a cluster, the cluster network name and the network names for any clustered roles that are still registered in Domain Name System (DNS). But, the difference is that there will be no computer objects created in AD DS. That stands for the cluster name object (CNO) and any computer objects for clustered roles (Virtual Computer Objects or VCOs) This gives you the possibility to create a failover cluster without the need to create computer objects in AD DS or pre-stage those objects in AD DS. This method is however not advised when you have a scenario that requires Kerberos authentication. This method will use Kerberos authentication for intra-cluster communication but will use NTLM authentication when authentication against the cluster network name is required. More information can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn265970.aspx
Quorum improvements
To increase the high availability of your cluster and all the roles that are installed on that cluster, you can configure a quorum. More information on a quorum can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/ en-us/library/jj612870.aspx
11. ReFS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFS
40
Dynamic witness Dynamic witness is one of the improvements made to the quorum. One of the issues administrators struggled with was making the decision if they are going to use a witness or not. In Windows Server 2012 you had to manually adjust the quorum configuration if you added or evicted a node. This had to be done to make sure that you keep the total number of votes at an odd number. This feature changes this. Now it is recommended to ALWAYS configure a quorum witness. Windows Server 2012 R2 will dynamically decide whether the quorum witness has a vote. If there are an odd number of votes, then the witness doesnt have a vote. When there is an even number of votes, the quorum witness has a vote. This quorum witness vote is also dynamically adjusted based on the state of the witness resource. If that resource is failed or offline, then the witness vote will be set to 0 Because this is done automatically for you, you should check from time to time what state it is in. By using the PowerShell cmdlet (Get-Cluster).WitnessDynamicWeight you will see the value. 0 means that the witness does not have a vote and 1 indicates that it has a vote. Quorum user interface improvements If you want to see the vote status today in Windows Server 2012, you need to run the Validate Quorum Configuration validation report or use PowerShell to find out. These methods remain in Windows Server 2012 R2 but are also visible now through the Failover Cluster Manager interface. You can see which nodes have a vote and whether that vote is active. More importantly, the report and the parameters for the Set-ClusterQuorum cmdlet have been simplified so that you dont need to use quorum terminology anymore. This can be important if you are running scripts with this cmdlet. Force quorum resiliency If there is a partitioned cluster in Windows Server 2012 (also known as split cluster or split-brain cluster), you need to manually restart the partitioned nodes after that the connectivity is restored. This should be done with the /pq switch and it is best practice to do this as soon as possible. In Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview both sides will automatically reconcile when the connectivity is restored. The side that you started force quorum with will have authority. Tie breaker for 50% node split A cluster can adjust a running nodes vote to keep the total number of votes at an odd number. This works seamlessly with dynamic witness. As described above, a cluster will first adjust the quorum witness vote. But, what if a quorum witness is not available? In that case, the cluster can adjust a nodes vote. On top of that, there is a new cluster common property that will determine which site survives if there is a 50% node split where neither site has quorum.
41
You can use the LowerQuorumPriorityNodeID to determine which node will have its vote removed. In PowerShell, this is done by (Get-Cluster).LowerQuorumPriorityNodeID = 1 It is important to know is that you only need to do this on one node in the site.
Configure the global update manager mode

When a state change occurs in the cluster (node down, taken offline) all the other nodes need to be notified of the change and acknowledge it before the cluster commits the change to the database. The component responsible for this is called the Global Update Manager. In Windows Server 2012, you cant configure anything about this component. In Windows Server 2012 R2, you can configure the Global Update Manager with 3 values. All (write) add Local (read) This is the default setting in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview for all workloads (besides Hyper-V) Every cluster needs to receive and process the update before it is committed to the database T he read happen on the local node. Since the database is consistent on all nodes there is no danger for out-of-date or stale information Majority (read and write) This is the default setting in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview for Hyper-V failover clusters. A majority of the cluster nodes must receive and process the update before it is committed to the database T he cluster will compare the latest timestamp from a majority of the running nodes when he wants to do a database read and use the data with the latest timestamp Majority (write) an Local (read) A majority of the cluster nodes must receive and process the update before the cluster commits the change to the database Database reads occur on the local node. Therefore, it could be that the data is out of date or stale To choose the value, you can use PowerShell: (Get-Cluster).DatabaseReadWriteMode will give you a value of 0 (All (write) and Local (read), 1 (Majority (read and write) or 2 (Majority (write) and local (read))
42
Cluster node health detection

A cluster detects their health by using heartbeats. Each node exchanges heartbeats. By default, this is every one second. The amount of heartbeats that can be missed is known as the heartbeat threshold. In Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview, this threshold has been increased for failover Hyper-V clusters to make sure that the cluster doesnt perform recovery actions when there is a temporary network failure. The default threshold in Windows Server 2012 is 5 seconds. In Windows Server 2012 R2, this has been increased to 10 seconds if the nodes are in the same subnets and to 20 seconds if they are in different subnets. For other cluster roles, the heartbeat threshold remains the same (5 seconds) in the same and different subnet.
Turn off IPsec encryption for inter-node cluster communication

In Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview, you can turn off Internet Protocol security (IPsec) for inter-node cluster communication. This can help because there are possibilities that AD DS can become temporarily unavailable (because of high latency Group Policy updates). Since IPsec encryption relies on AD DS, the communication is interrupted until AD DS is available. You can change this by using PowerShell: (Get-Cluster).NetFTIPSecEnabled = 0 Please note that Microsoft advises not to turn of the IPsec encryption unless you are experiencing those issues.
Cluster dashboard
The last update to failover clustering is a cosmetic update, but for many people, a very useful update. Failover Cluster Manager now includes a cluster dashboard. This will give you a convenient way to check the health of all of your failover clusters.
43
Chapter 4: Hyper-V
Hyper-V version 3 that comes with Windows Server 2012 is known as the hypervisor that comes on par with VMware. We are seeing an enormous growth in the adaption of Hyper-V and that the solution is stable and has many features and possibilities. The difference between Hyper-V 2 and Hyper-V 3 was so enormous many referenced it as Microsofts big bang in the hypervisor world. With the upcoming R2, they continue on that path and they have a huge amount of new and updated features.
Shared virtual hard disk

Starting from this R2 preview, you now have the possibility to share a virtual disk (VHDX) between multiple Virtual Machines. With this feature, you can build a Hyper-V guest failover cluster. Before Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview, you needed to expose your underlying storage topology to the Virtual Machine which increased the complexity in your environment and gave you additional management challenges. Examples to use this technology are SQL Server database files and file servers that are running on a Virtual Machine. To be able to use this functionality, you have a few requirements: Y ou can only use the VHDX format. However, the virtual disk that contains the Operating System can still use the VHD format. T his features is both supported in Generation 1 and Generation 2 Virtual Machines (Virtual Machine differences will be discussed later) You need at least a two-node Hyper-V failover cluster The Hyper-V hosts need to run Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview The servers need to belong to the same Active Directory domain T here needs to be shared storage. This includes CSVs (on block storage, including Clustered Storage Spaces) and Scale-out File Servers with SMB 3.0 (on file-based storage) Enough resources (memory, disk and CPU capacity) On http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn281956.aspx, you can find more information on the shared storage possibilities and a graphical overview of how this works. Enabling virtual hard disk sharing is pretty easy to do and can be found under the advanced features of your hard drive in the Virtual Machine settings. Important to note is that you cant enable virtual hard disk sharing on an IDE controller based hard drive. The hard drive needs to be connected to a SCSI Controller
44
Figure 23: Hyper-V: enabling virtual hard disk sharing
Resizing virtual hard disks

Resizing virtual hard disks is not new, however, Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview gives you the ability to do this while the Virtual Machine is running. The requirements for supporting this administrative action are: The hard disk must be in VHDX format. This can be fixed, differencing and dynamic disks. The hard disk must be connected to a SCSI controller. You need to take a few things into consideration. Expanding a virtual hard disk is increasing the disk capacity and can be performed every moment. After the expansion, you need to login to the Virtual Machine and use disk manager to expand the volume.
45
Figure 24: Expand Virtual Hard Disk wizard
Shrinking a virtual hard disk can be another challenge. Before you are able to shrink a hard disk to a specific size, you need to make sure that the volume in the Virtual Machine is shrunk to a specific size. When that is complete, you can use the online shrink option. Last but not least, you can do this through PowerShell also. The cmdlet to perform this is the ResizeVirtualDisk cmdlet. Example: Resize-virtualdisk friendlyname filedata size (100GB) Full information on Resize-VirtualDisk can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ hh848658.aspx
Storage Quality of Service

A completely new feature for Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview is called Storage Quality of Service (Storage QoS). This enables the possibility to specify a maximum IOPS value for a virtual hard drive. This provides you with many possibilities to right-size your environments. A few possibilities are: G iving end-users less IOPS on their Virtual Machines (in a hosted environment or for dev / test scenarios) The possibility to give less critical Virtual Machines less IOPS
12. IOPS: input/output operations per second
46
Infrastructures that work with tenants and share storage over multiple divisions, customers and endusers will like this feature. One Virtual Machine wont be able to grab all the IOPS on storage and leave the other VMs with less performance. Storage QoS is done on a per virtual hard disk base and can be configured under the Advanced Features of your virtual disk.
Figure 25: Storage Quality of Service under Advanced Features
As you can see in Figure 24 you can set a threshold for the minimum and maximum value. IOPS are measured in 8KB increments. Besides using the GUI, you can define this through PowerShell also. Note that the Minimum is something that cant be forced if your systems are running out of IOPS. At that time, an event will be generated which can be picked up by monitoring systems to alert the administrator.
Live migrations
Live migration has received a lot of improvements in Windows Server 2012 and is already known to be very good. In Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview there are 2 updates to live migration. The first update is additional options that an administrator can define to improve the performance of his live migrations depending on his or hers infrastructure. The administrator can now choose to optimize its live migration over three different settings
47
Figure 26: Performance Options for Live Migration
TCP/IP is the option that is used in Windows Server 2012 and copies the memory of a Virtual Machine over a TCP/IP connection. Compression means that the memory of a Virtual Machine first is compressed before being sent over a TCP/IP connection. You will need less bandwidth with this option and in cases of network lag this can improve the performance. This is now the default option in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview. SMB 3.0 protocol is the third possibility and will copy the memory over a SMB 3.0 connection. This could improve the performance greatly, certainly when it is combined with SMB Direct or SMB Multichannel. Cross-version live migrations Ready to deploy some new and shiny Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview servers? How about all of your Virtual Machines that are running on Windows Server 2012? Instead of having downtime during the migration path, you can now migrate a Virtual Machine that runs on Windows Server 2012 to Windows Server 2012 R2. However, before starting to migrate, dont forget that you cant downgrade so that is not an option. Migration can be done using the traditional GUI in Hyper-V manager or by using the Move-VM cmdlet.
Virtual Machine generation

Virtual Machines as we know them today are called Virtual Machines generation 1. Theyve existed for a long time and still emulate a full server. With the release of Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview, there is a new generation. Generation 2 Virtual Machines have a more simplified virtual hardware model and support UEFI firmware instead of BIOS based firmware. Besides a different firmware, there is also the removal of the majority of emulated devices.
13. UEFI: Unified Extensible Firmware Interface: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface
48
Figure 27: Generation 1 VM Settings
Figure 28: Generation 2 VM Settings
49
In a Generation 2 Virtual Machine, there are no more IDE drives and COM devices. The diskette drive is also removed and the legacy network adapter cannot be used anymore. Generation 2 delivers new functionality to the Virtual Machine such as Secure boot (enabled by default) Boot from a SCSI virtual hard drive Boot from a SCSI virtual DVD drive PXE boot using a standard network adapter Choosing what kind of generation you want for your Virtual Machine needs to be done during the creation and cannot be changed afterwards. When you create a new Virtual Machine Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview you will receive this question in the wizard:
Figure 29: Choose your generation in the new Virtual Machine wizard
Not every guest Operating System is supported to be a generation 2 Virtual Machine. Only the following Operating Systems are candidates: Windows Server 2012 Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview 64 bit versions of Windows 8 64 bit versions of Windows 8.1 Preview
50
While you cant switch generations after the creation of the Virtual Machine, you still have the possibility to mix generation 1 and generation 2 Virtual Machines on the same host to support older Windows Operating Systems or to support non-windows Operating Systems.
Integration Services
This new functionality allows administrators to copy files to a running Virtual Machine even is this Virtual Machine has no network connection. This is done through some new functionality inside the integration services called the Guest Services.
Figure 30: Guest Services (default off) under Integration Services
You can enable this feature by going to the Integration Services property page of a Virtual Machine and activating the checkbox. By default, this feature is off. If you dont want to do this through a GUI, you can use the Enable-VMIntegrationService cmdlet. There is also a new PowerShell cmdlet called Copy-VMFile to support the copying of files to a Virtual Machine.
51
Export
Exporting a Virtual Machine or Virtual Machine checkpoint while it is running is supported in this release. Being able to do this without shutting down a Virtual Machine is a big improvement and many IT administrators will be very happy with this option. Imagine that you want to have a copy of a specific Virtual Machine where you want to try out some new hotfixes or updates. Now you will be able to export your running Virtual Machine in production and use that VM in an isolated environment to test out some scenarios. Using this functionality to test Disaster Recovery scenarios is also a possibility and there are many more reasons why you are going to love this feature.
Figure 31: Exporting a running Virtual Machine
If you dont want to use the GUI, you can use the Export-VM and Export-VMSnapshot cmdlets
Failover Clustering and Hyper-V

If you are having a Hyper-V failover cluster, you get new types of failure detection. Physical storage failures that are not managed by Windows Failover Clustering will be automatically detected when the Virtual Machine has a failure on its boot disk or on any other disk that is associated with the Virtual Machine. When that happens, the Windows Failover Cluster will relocate the Virtual Machine and restart it on another node. The same type of functionality is provided when the cluster detects network connectivity issues for the Virtual Machine. See more on Virtual Machine network health detection. A note of caution here!
52
While this is a great enhancement and most certainly will be very helpful, it doesnt eliminate the monitoring of the storage and the network. In the end, the problem might be fixed by relocating the Virtual Machine to another host (when there is a faulty network card or fiber channel card on the host) but it doesnt solve the actual problem and because the failover cluster has solved the problem, there is a danger that this can be unseen by IT administrators so that the actual problem remains.
Enhanced session mode

Enhanced Session mode is a new feature that allows IT administrators to have similar functionality to a remote desktop connection. As of today, when you are using the Virtual Machine connection, you have screen, keyboard and mouse redirection (and some limited copy functionality). With the enhanced session mode, you get much more redirection capabilities without the need of having a remote desktop session. The list of redirection possibilities: Display configuration Audio Printers Clipboard Smart Cards Drives USB devices Supported Plug and Play devices. Because of this added functionality, you will be able to do more on your Virtual Machines even when you dont have a network connection to your Virtual Machine to initiate a remote desktop session. If you want to use this, your guest Operating System needs to run the Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview or the Windows 8.1 Preview. By default, this setting is disabled on a Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview (it is enabled by default on a windows 8.1 Preview running Hyper-V). You need to enable it on a host.
53
Figure 32: Enabling Session Mode
The next time you connect to a Virtual Machine running Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview or Windows 8.1 preview, you will get the following pop-ups
Figure 33: Connecting to a VM in Enhanced Session Mode
54
By clicking on the Show Options, you will have more possibilities. If you want to save these settings for future connections, make sure to click on the Save my settings for future connections to this Virtual Machine checkbox.
Figure 34: More settings in Enhanced Session mode
When you have saved your settings, you will have an additional menu option when you right click on your Virtual Machine.
Figure 35: Editing your session preferences
55
Hyper-V Replica
Hyper-V Replica was one of those features in Windows Server 2012 that got a lot of feedback and was (is) extremely popular. Microsoft is adding the following features into the Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview: E xtended replication: With extended replication, you can let your replica on your replica server extend that one more to a third server which is called the extended replica server. T he frequency of replication that previously was a fixed value (5 minutes) is now configurable between 30 seconds, 5 minutes and 15 minutes.
Figure 36: Choosing your replication frequency
Note that your connection between the production server and replica server needs to be able to handle this frequency of replication. Last but not least, if you are working with additional recovery points, you now can cover 24 hours while it used to be 15 hours in the previous version.
56
Figure 37: Additional Recovery Points
Linux support
Linux support in Hyper-V has also received some enhancements. Supporting Linux Operating Systems with the updated integration services can use Dynamic Memory the same way that Virtual Machines running Windows Server do. And those machines now can also be backed up the same way as your Windows Virtual Machines.
Management
It used to be impossible to manage a down-level version of Hyper-V if you were running the latest version of the Hyper-V management console. That gave IT administrators a lot of issues when they worked in an environment that had a mix of hypervisor versions. With Hyper-V Manager in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview or Windows 8.1 Preview, you can manage both Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview Hyper-V from the same console.
Automatic Virtual Machine Activation

Many IT administrators know the pain of activating Virtual Machines in their environment, especially when they start deploying private clouds and offer self-service capabilities. While system center 2012 Virtual Machine manager can help with this, it is still a fact that you need to activate the Virtual Machine, automated or not.
57
Automatic Virtual Machine Activation (AVMA) changes this procedure by binding the Virtual Machine to the licensed Hyper-V hosts and activating the Virtual Machine when it starts. This features requires only Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter, but the VM needs to run Windows Server 2012 R2 also (Datacenter, Standard or Essentials) Starting with AVMA is pretty simple. On the Hyper-V host, type in the following command (elevated command prompt or PowerShell) Slmgr /ipl <AVMA_key>
Figure 38: Registering an AVMA key
An AVMA key that can be used with this preview can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/enus/library/dn303421.aspx
58
Chapter 5: Remote Desktop Services

Windows Server 2012 brought us a huge amount of new features and improvements in Remote Desktop Services. Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployments, Session Virtualization deployments, Centralized resource publishing and a much richer experience with RDP are amongst those enhancements and new features. The deployment of such an infrastructure also has become much easier. Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview brings again more enhancements.
Session shadowing
Session shadowing is a technique that has been known in the Citrix world for a long time. Windows Server 2012 R2 brings this to RDS also.
Figure 39: Right-click on a session to start shadowing
When you start your shadow session, you will be asked what kind of control you want
Figure 40: Choosing Shadow control
Note the check on prompt for user consent (on by default). Now the end-user will receive a question whether he or she wants to allow this.
59
Figure 41: End-user receives question for the control session
When the end-user chooses Yes, then the administrator will have the control window
Figure 42: Administrator shadow session control window
Online storage deduplication

Storage deduplication was introduced with Windows Server 2012 and was one of those features that gave you amazing results. In Windows Server 2012, it was not supported to run storage deduplication on your running Virtual Machines, but with Windows Server 2012 R2, that has changed for running personal desktop collections. If your VDIs are stored on a file server running Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview and accessed by using SMB, then you can reduce your storage capacity requirements by enabling storage deduplication. Besides saving storage, you will also benefit from performance improvements because the SMB server caches frequently accessed data.
60
Improved RemoteApp behavior

RemoteApp comes closer to the real deal. What I mean by that is that the look and feel of your applications that are running on a RDS host are acting the same as your applications that are installed locally. Including support for transparency, live thumbnails and seamless application moves might not seem like a big deal to the average administrator, but it sure is for the end-user. This is certainly an added value in an IT administrators quest to work with this kind of technology. After all, if the end-user doesnt want to work with it, then it cant succeed as a technology.
Quick reconnect for remote desktop clients

One of the other items that sometimes caused frustration with end-users was the time necessary to reconnect to their virtual desktops, session-based desktops or RemoteApp programs. This quick reconnect improves the performance for reconnecting and the connection process for RemoteApp programs has been redesigned for the Windows 8.1 Preview and Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview clients and has become more informative and user friendly.
Figure 43: Connecting to remote apps through the web interface
61
Improved compression and bandwidth usage

Users are demanding to have access to their data and applications 24/7. The major concern for this functionality is bandwidth on the road. As a frequent traveler, Ive been in too many hotels with very bad wireless connection. By using better codecs that enable compression, saving on bandwidth (for example, according to Microsoft, video content will use up to 50% less bandwidth compared to windows server 2012) the experience will be much better for your end-users or customers.
Dynamic display handling

Windows 8.1 Preview and Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview have support for display changes. This means that it can seamlessly handle device rotation, monitor addition or the addition of a projector and it will be reflected on the remote client instantly. This adds again to the seamless experience and to the demand of end-users to be able to connect wherever they want and with whatever device they want.
RemoteFx virtualized GPU supports DX11.1

DX11.1 is the successor of DX11 and is only supported on Windows 8. Some functionality has been provided in Windows 7 with a platform update, but to enjoy all the capabilities of 11.1 you need Windows 8. This is very interesting when you are a gamer or are using applications that need rendering functionality or is vector-based. Before you can enjoy from this functionality you need to have a GPU card that actually supports DX11.1 In Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview, you can run applications that rely on DX11.1 features when your client is Windows 8.1 Preview or Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview. Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview introduces the following functionality: N on-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) support: RemoteFX running on NUMA-based platforms will experience improved scaling capabilities V ideo RAM (VRAM) changes: Adding system memory to the server running Hyper-V will allow for a dynamic increase in Virtual Machine VRAM which can improve performance for applications
62
Chapter 6: Windows PowerShell

With the R2 release of Windows Server 2012, a new version of PowerShell will be released also. This version will be known as PowerShell 4.0 and will include some major improvements for those who are working with PowerShell on a regular basis. As you already read on many different topics in this book, most of the new and enhanced features in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview come with new PowerShell cmdlets. Therefore, we are not going to discuss those here again but we are going to talk about the new and improved general stuff in Windows PowerShell 4.0 and highlight a few of these improvements.
Windows PowerShell Desired State Configuration

Desired State Configuration (DSC) is a management system in PowerShell 4.0 that enables the deployment and management of configuration data for software services and the environment in which these services run. For those who have been working with System Center Configuration Manager, this should ring a bell. More information on how to get started can be found here: http://technet.microsoft. com/en-US/library/dn249918.aspx
Save-help
Probably one of the handiest new features. One of the things that bothered me the most in the past was the fact that you needed to have a connection to the internet in order to download the help information for the modules. With this command, you can actually download the help files from a remote computer with internet access (even if that remote computer doesnt have those specific modules installed) and then copy that help file to the specific server. Syntax: Parameter Set: Path Save-Help [-DestinationPath] <String[]> [[-Module] <String[]> ] [[-UICulture] <CultureInfo[]> ] [-Credential <PSCredential> ] [-Force] [-UseDefaultCredentials] [ <CommonParameters>] Parameter Set: LiteralPath Save-Help [[-Module] <String[]> ] [[-UICulture] <CultureInfo[]> ] -LiteralPath <String[]> [-Credential <PSCredential> ] [-Force] [-UseDefaultCredentials] [ <CommonParameters>] If you want to install saved help files, you can use the cmdlet Update-Help to do so. Syntax: Parameter Set: Path Update-Help [[-Module] <String[]> ] [[-SourcePath] <String[]> ] [[-UICulture] <CultureInfo[]> ] [-Credential <PSCredential> ] [-Force] [-Recurse] [-UseDefaultCredentials] [ <CommonParameters>]
63
Parameter Set: LiteralPath Update-Help [[-Module] <String[]> ] [[-UICulture] <CultureInfo[]> ] [-Credential <PSCredential> ] [-Force] [-LiteralPath <String[]> ] [-Recurse] [-UseDefaultCredentials] [ <CommonParameters>]
Windows PowerShell debugger

The Windows PowerShell debugger has been enhanced with some additional functionality. Debugging PowerShell workflows and scripts that run on remote computers is now possible. And this can be done from the Windows PowerShell command line or from the Windows PowerShell ISE (Integrated Scripting Environment). If your PowerShell remote session disconnects then the Remote debugging session is preserved when you reconnect.
More updates
Below is a list of different additional updates (taken from http://technet.microsoft.com/library/ hh857339.aspx): Register-ScheduledJob and Set-ScheduledJob has a RunNow parameter. (No more date and time that needs to be set) The Headers parameter has been fixed for the Invoke-RestMethod and Invoke-WebRequest so that you can set all headers. G et-Module has a new parameter, FullyQualifiedName, of the type ModuleSpecification[]. The Name parameter of Get-Module now lets you specify a module by using the module's name, version and GUID. As before, it also lets you specify a module by using only the name. T he default execution policy setting on Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview is RemoteSigned. On Windows 8.1 Preview, there is no change in default setting. S tarting in Windows PowerShell 4.0, method invocation by using dynamic method names is supported. A synchronous workflow jobs are no longer deleted when the time-out period that is specified by the PSElapsedTimeoutSec workflow common parameter has elapsed. A new parameter, RepeatIndefinitely, has been added to the New-JobTrigger and Set-JobTrigger cmdlets. This eliminates the necessity of specifying a TimeSpan.MaxValue value for the RepetitionDuration parameter to run a scheduled job repeatedly, for an indefinite period. A Passthru parameter has been added to the Enable-JobTrigger and Disable-JobTrigger cmdlets. The Passthru parameter displays any objects that are created or modified by your command. T he parameter names for specifying a workgroup in the Add-Computer and Remove-Computer cmdlets are now consistent. Both cmdlets now use the parameter WorkgroupName.
64
A new common parameter, PipelineVariable, has been added. PipelineVariable lets you save the results of a piped command (or part of a piped command) as a variable that can be passed through the remainder of the pipeline. Collection filtering by using a method syntax is now supported. The Get-Process cmdlet has a new switch parameter, IncludeUserName. A new cmdlet, Get-FileHash, that gets information about file hashes, has been added. In Windows PowerShell 4.0, if a module uses the DefaultCommandPrefix key in its manifest, or if the user imports a module with the Prefix parameter, the ExportedCommands property of the module shows the commands in the module with the prefix. When you run the commands by using the module-qualified syntax, ModuleName\CommandName, the command names must include the prefix. The value of $PSVersionTable.PSVersion has been updated to 4.0.
Windows PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment

There are also new updates to the Windows PowerShell ISE. As already stated, the Windows PowerShell ISE will support workflow and remote script debugging and IntelliSense support is added for Windows PowerShell Desired State Configuration providers and configurations.
Windows PowerShell workflow

Below are the new features (taken from http://technet.microsoft.com/library/hh857339.aspx): S upport has been added for a new PipelineVariable common parameter in the context of iterative pipelines, such as those used by System Center Orchestrator; that is, pipelines that run commands simply left-to-right, as opposed to interspersed running by using streaming. P arameter binding has been significantly enhanced to work outside of tab completion scenarios, such as with commands that do not exist in the current runspace. S upport for custom container activities has been added to Windows PowerShell Workflow. If an activity parameter is of the types Activity, Activity[]or is a generic collection of activitiesand the user has supplied a script block as an argument, then Windows PowerShell Workflow converts the script block to XAML, as with normal Windows PowerShell script-to-workflow compilation. After a crash, Windows PowerShell Workflow automatically reconnects to managed nodes. You can now throttle Foreach-Parallel activity statements by using the ThrottleLimit property. The ErrorAction common parameter has a new valid value, Suspend, which is exclusively for workflows. A workflow endpoint now automatically closes if there are no active sessions, no in-progress jobs, and no pending jobs. This feature conserves resources on the computer that is acting as the workflow server, when the automatic closure conditions have been met. 65
Windows PowerShell web services

Below are the new features (taken from http://technet.microsoft.com/library/hh857339.aspx): W hen an error occurs in Windows PowerShell Web Services (PSWS, also called Management OData IIS Extension), while a cmdlet is running, more detailed error messages are returned to the caller. In addition, error codes follow Windows Azure REST API error code guidelines. A n endpoint can now define the API version, as well as enforce the usage of a specific API version. Whenever version mismatches occur between client and server, errors are displayed to both the client and the server. M anagement of the dispatch schema has been simplified by automatically generating values for any missing fields in the schema. Generation occurs, as a helpful starting point, even if the dispatch schema does not exist. T ype handling in PSWS has been improved to support types that use a different constructor than the default constructor, by behaving similarly to the PSTypeConverter in Windows PowerShell. This lets you use complex types with PSWS. P SWS now allows expanding an associated instance while running a query. For larger binary contents (such as images, audio, or video), the transfer cost is significant, and it is better to transfer binary data without encoding. PSWS uses named resource streams for transferring without encoding. The named resource stream is a property of an entity of the Edm.Stream type. Each named resource stream has a separate URI for GET or UPDATE operations. O Data actions now provide a mechanism for invoking non-CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) methods on a resource. You can invoke an action by sending an HTTP POST request to the URI that is defined for the action. The parameters for the action are defined in the body of the POST request. T o be consistent with Windows Azure guidelines, all URLs should be simplified. A change included in Key As Segment allows single keys to be represented as segments. Note that references that use multiple key values require comma-separated values in parenthetical notation, as before. B efore this release of PSWS, the only way to perform Create, Update, or Delete operations was to invoke Post, Put, or Delete on a top-level resource. New in this release of PSWS, Contained Resource operations let users achieve the same results while reaching the same resource less directly, approaching as if these resources were contained.
66
Windows PowerShell web access

Below are the new features (taken from http://technet.microsoft.com/library/hh857339.aspx): Y ou can disconnect from and reconnect to existing sessions in the web-based Windows PowerShell Web Access console. A Save button in the web-based console lets you disconnect from a session without deleting it, and reconnect to the session another time. D efault parameters can be displayed on the sign-in page. To display default parameters, configure values for all of the settings displayed in the Optional Connection Settings area of the sign-in page in a file named web.config. You can use the web.config file to configure all optional connection settings except for a second or alternate set of credentials. I n Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview, you can remotely manage authorization rules for Windows PowerShell Web Access. The Add-PswaAuthorizationRule and Test-PswaAuthorizationRule cmdlets now include a Credential parameter that enables administrators to manage authorization rules from a remote computer, or in a Windows PowerShell Web Access session. Y ou can now have multiple Windows PowerShell Web Access sessions in a single browser session, by using a new browser tab for each session. You no longer need to open a new browser session to connect to a new session in the web-based Windows PowerShell console.
Windows PowerShell 4.0 bug fixes

Below are the bug fixes in 4.0 (taken from http://technet.microsoft.com/library/hh857339.aspx): Get-Counter can now return counters that contain an apostrophe character in French editions of Windows. You can now view the GetType method on deserialized objects. #Requires statements now let users require Administrator access rights, if needed. The Import-Csv cmdlet now ignores blank lines. A problem where Windows PowerShell ISE uses too much memory when you are running an InvokeWebRequest command has been fixed. Get-Module now displays module versions in a Version column. Remove-Item Recurse now removes items from subfolders as expected. A UserName property has been added to Get-Process output objects. The Invoke-RestMethod cmdlet now returns all available results. Add-Member now takes effect on hashtables, even if the hashtables have not yet been accessed. Select-Object Expand no longer fails or generates an exception if the value of the property is null or empty.
67
G et-Process can now be used in a pipeline with other commands that get the ComputerName property from objects. C onvertTo-Json and ConvertFrom-Json can now accept terms within double quotes, and its error messages are now localizable. Get-Job now returns any completed scheduled jobs, even in new sessions. I ssues with mounting and unmounting VHDs by using the FileSystem provider in Windows PowerShell 4.0 have been fixed. Windows PowerShell is now able to detect new drives when they are mounted in the same session. You no longer need to explicitly load ScheduledJob or Workflow modules to work with their job types. P erformance improvements have been made to the process of importing workflows that define nested workflows; this process is now faster.
68
Chapter 7: Windows Deployment Services

Windows Deployment Services is not a stranger for many of us. Simply stated, it is a server role that enables you to remotely deploy Windows Operating Systems. Some of you are probably using the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit or even Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager to deploy Operating Systems but the free server role can manage a lot of these tasks also. The best part about this role is that it gives the power of automated deployments to the smallest shops out there and eliminates the need for manual deployments from CDs, USBs or DVDs. There arent any new capabilities that come with Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview compared to Windows Server 2012. There is one major change and that is the fact that you now have PowerShell cmdlet scripting. You can discover all the WDS cmdlets by using the command Get-Command Module WDS
Figure 44: The WDS Cmdlets
14. MDT: Microsoft Deployment Toolkit
69
Chapter 8: Directory services & security

Directory services are a key component in everyones environment. The ability to authenticate users and/or devices is a must in todays world and is one of the most important security defenses. (But certainly not the only one). As already stated in the introduction, people want to access applications and data on any device, at whatever time, wherever they are. And those devices are far from company property alone. Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview has added the following: Workplace Join (discussed in Chapter 1: Work Folders) Single Sign-On (SSO) Work from anywhere Multi-Factor authentication Multi-Factor Access Control OAuth 2.0 Support
Single Sign-On
Single Sign-On (SSO) is a technique for an end-user to sign-in once to a companys application and then he or she will never need to sign-in again when they are using other company applications. This technique has existed already for quite some time when your PC domain joined. Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview brings this technique to workplace joined devices.
Work from anywhere

As discussed in the introduction, our workforce is very mobile and wants to work from anywhere. Yet they need access to the corporate data and applications. To achieve this, you can use existing technologies such as VPN, Direct Access, Remote Desktop Gateways and more. In Windows Server 2012 R2 an additional technology is introduced called a Web Application Proxy role service that is added to the Routing and Remote Access Service role. This role allows you to publish enterprise LOB (Line-of-Business) web applications so that they can be accessed from outside of the corporate network. This role is an extension for the AD FS (Active Directory Federation Services) proxy.
Multi-factor authentication
Multi-Factor Authentication has been made much simpler to implement in Windows Server 2012 R2. There is a plug-in model that allows you to plug-in different multi-factor authentications in AD FS.
70
Multi-factor access control

Multi-Factor Access Control is something completely new and allows IT Professionals to create application specific access control policies based on various (and multiple) criteria. You can create those policies on criteria such as user identity, device identity, location (intranet extranet) and more.
OAuth 2.0 support

OAuth 2.0 has been released to Windows Azure AD already as a preview. This is also now foreseen in Windows Server 2012 R2.
Security
With each new version of Windows Server, Microsoft is adding new features or improving existing features around security. The changes are all listed and explained here: http://technet.microsoft.com/library/hh831778.aspx. There are changes to applocker, bitlocker, TPM, TLS/SSL and many more. The one change that caught my eye is the fact that Windows Defender is now available and enabled by default on a Server Core.
Group Policy
Group Policy allows you to specify specific configurations for servers, workstations and users in your environment. Depending on whether you use Group Policy settings or preferences you can force those or allow people to modify (some) of them. There are 3 changes in the Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview compared to Windows Server 2012. IPv6 Support Windows Server 2012 R2 expands the support for IPv6 in Group Policy to support printers, item-level targeting and VPN networks. The IPv6 support can be found under User Configuration > Preferences > Control Panel Settings > Printers > New > TCP/IP Printer
71
Figure 45: Select the IPv6 checkbox to add an IPv6 address
For Item-Level Targeting, go to User Configuration or Computer Configuration > Preferences > Any preference that you made > Right-click Properties > Common Tab Then choose Item-level targeting and click on the Targeting Editor button. Add an IP Address Range and select the Use IPv6 checkbox.
Figure 46: Adding IPv6 range for Item-level targeting
For VPN Connections go to User Configuration > Preferences > Control Panel Settings > Network Option > New > VPN Connection
72
Figure 47: IPv6 checkbox for VPN Group Policy preference
Policy caching When Group Policy receives the latest version of a policy from a domain controller it will then write that policy to a local store. The next time the computer or server reboots, it will read the most recent downloaded version from the local store first instead of downloading it. This will improve the time to process the policy and therefore shorten the boot time. This will happen if your group policy is running in synchronous mode and can become very handy when using remote domain controllers or when you work with direct access. You can control this by changing the Configure Group Policy Caching policy. Event logging Group Policy now has more detailed events in the operational event log. It will include more information such as how long it takes to download and process policies and includes details on WMP processing. All this information should make it easier to analyze and diagnose long log-on times.
73
Chapter 9: Features that are removed or deprecated

This is always one hot topic when a new Operating System version is released. What is removed and what is deprecated? Whether you like it or not, this is a necessary process for Microsoft to continue to improve their Operating System. Sometimes one feature that you rely heavily on is removed which means you need to revise your strategy. The good thing is that Microsoft releases this list in an early stadium so that you have enough time to see if you need to adapt your infrastructure or applications before upgrading to Windows Server 2012 R2 when it is GA. Below is a list of features that are removed or deprecated in both Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview. Again, this list is subject to change by the time of RTM and is copied from TechNet: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn303411.aspx Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview Windows Server 2012 Feature AD FS v1 Web Agent AD FS in-place upgrade from AD FS 1.0 or out of box AD FS 2.0 AD FS support for Resource Group AD FS support for NT Token mode AD FS support for using AD LDS as an authentication store AD RMS license revocation AD RMS SDK Application Server role Built-in drivers for tape drives Removed Deprecated Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview Removed Deprecated
15. Deprecated: deprecated means planned for potential removal in subsequent releases
74
Cluster Automation Server COM API
(made optional)
(made optional)
Cluster.exe command-line interface
(made optional)
(made optional)
CertObj COM and InetInfo interfaces of the Web Server role Dcpromo.exe Dfscmd.exe Drivers for Jet Red RDBMS and ODBC File Replication Service GAA_FLAG_INCLUDE_TUNNEL_ BINDINGORDER at in GetAdaptersAddresses Internet Information Service (IIS) 6.0 Manager Layered Service Providers IscsiVirtualDiskSnapshot and associated WMI methods LPR/LPD protocol Namespace for version 1.0 of WMI; WMIC (in WMI) Net DMA Network Access Protection (NAP) Network Information Services (NIS) and Tools (in RSAT) Nfsshare.exe NFSv2 support

75
Oclist.exe ODBC support for 16- and 32-bit applications and drivers ODBC/OLEDB support for Microsoft Oracle ODBC/OLEDB support for SQL beyond SQL Server 7 and SQL 2000 Providers for SNMP, Win32_ServerFeature API, Active Directory, MSClus WMI1.0 (in WMI) Recovery disk creation Remote Data Service Role Collector (Ceiprole.exe) and associated API SCSIport host-bus adapter Servermanagercmd.exe SIS Limited API SMB 1.0 SMB.sys SMTP and associated management tools SQLXMLX Storage Explorer snap-in for MMC Storage Manager for SANs snap-in for MMC Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications Support for 32-bit cluster resource DLLs Support for hardware drivers for XDDM
76
Support for Microsoft SQL Server prior to 7.0 Support for native VGA via the PC/AT BIOS or UEFI CSM Support for Static VMQ Support for Token Rings Support for Visual Studio Analyzer 2003 over ODBC, OLEDB, and ADO System Image Backup (Windows 7 File Recovery) Telnet server VM Chimney (also called TCP Ooad) (in Hyper-V) Windows Server 2003 domain and functional levels of Active Directory Windows Authorization Manager (AzMan) Windows Help executable (WinHlp32.exe) Windows Identity Foundation 3.5 Windows Server Resource Manager Winsock Direct WMI root\virtualization namespace (in Hyper-V) XDR schema elements, XSl pattern feature of MSXML3 (in XML)
For more information, visit http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn303411.aspx
77
Chapter 10: Conclusion

As you have read and seen, there are many new enhancements and features in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview. And as said in the disclaimer, there will be new ones popping-up in the coming months. Until R2 is GA (Global Available) Microsoft can still add more features and remove other ones. Windows Server 2012 R2 will certainly provide additional possibilities for organizations to lower their total cost of ownership and provide better methods for connectivity, access to data and more. Do you need to wait for GA to start exploring Windows Server 2012 R2? Certainly not. My advice here is to download it today, and use this eBook to start exploring. Happy learning, Mike
Thanks
A special thanks needs to be given to three specific people: Chris Henley (@NerdyLikeThat) who is my colleague at Veeam Software and supported me through the writing of this book. Didier Van Hoye (@WorkingHardInIt) is a fellow MVP and one of the most respected community members that I know. His knowledge is very deep and simply amazing. He pointed me, on many occasions, to the right direction while I was researching technologies. His blog posts are very good material to start researching. You can find his blog at http://workinghardinit.wordpress.com/ Aidan Finn (@Joe_Elway) is also a fellow MVP and can be placed in the same category as Didier. Very deep knowledge, very helpful and also one of my sources when looking at researching topics. He blogs at http://www.aidanfinn.com/
78
Appendix A: References
Chapter 1 references
Work folders overview (technet): http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn265974.aspx I ntroducing Work Folders on Windows Server 2012 R2: http://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/ archive/2013/07/10/introducing-work-folders-on-windows-server-2012-r2.aspx W hats New for SMB in Windows Server 2012 R2: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ hh831474 Server Message Block overview: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831795.aspx S torage and Availability improvements in Windows Server 2012 R2 (teched): http://channel9.msdn. com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/MDC-B333?ocid=aff-n-we-loc--ITPRO40922&WT.mc_ id=aff-n-we-loc--ITPRO40922#fbid=p6SGjtG757M I mprove Performance of a File Server with SMB Direct: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ jj134210.aspx RDC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_Differential_Compression D FS Namespace and DFS Replication Overview: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj127250.aspx W hat's New for iSCSI Target Server in Windows Server 2012 R2: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/ library/dn305893.aspx iSCSI Target Block Storage Overview: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh848272.aspx iSCSI Target Boot Overview: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh848273.aspx W hat is Storage Spaces: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/MDCB218#fbid=p6SGjtG757M R educe storage costs with Data Deduplication: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/ Europe/2013/MDC-B342#fbid=g2efN_gd6gC Data Deduplication Overview: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831602.aspx
W hats new in DHCP in Windows Server 2012 R2: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ dn305900.aspx W hats new in DNS Server in Windows Server 2012 R2: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ dn305898.aspx W hats new in IPAM in Windows Server 2012 R2: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ dn268500.aspx Walkthrough: Demonstrate IPAM in Windows Server 2012 R2: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/ 79
library/dn268503.aspx W hats new in Hyper-V Virtual Switch for Windows Server 2012 R2: http://technet.microsoft.com/enus/library/dn343757.aspx NIC Teaming Overview: http://technet.microsoft.com/library/hh831648.aspx Receive Side Scaling (RSS): http://technet.microsoft.com/library/hh997036.aspx Unified Tracing Overview: http://technet.microsoft.com/library/hh848933.aspx Netsh Commands for Network Trace: http://technet.microsoft.com/library/jj129382.aspx Windows Server Gateway: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn313101.aspx T est lab guide: Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V Network Virtualization with System Center 2012 R2 VMM: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=39284 H ow to Use a Server Running Windows Server 2012 R2 as a Gateway with VMM: http://technet.microsoft.com/library/dn249417.aspx C onfiguring VM Networks and Gateways in VMM: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj721575.aspx
Failover Clustering Overview: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831579.aspx W hats new in Failover Clustering in Windows Server 2012 R2: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn265972.aspx C ontinuous Availability: Deploying and Managing Clusters using Windows Server 2012 R2: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/MDCB305#fbid=p6SGjtG757M?ocid=aff-n-we-loc--ITPRO40922&WT.mc_id=aff-n-we-loc--ITPRO40922 U se Cluster Shared Volumes in a Windows Server 2012 Failover Cluster: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj612868.aspx E nable the CSV cache for read-intensive workloads: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj612868.aspx#BKMK_cache D eploy an Active Directory-Detached Cluster: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn265970.aspx C onfigure and Manage the Quorum in a Windows Server 2012 Failover Cluster http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj612870.aspx
80
W hats new in Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 R2: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn282278.aspx Hyper-V Overview: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831531.aspx Virtual Hard Disk Sharing Overview: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn281956.aspx O nline Virtual Hard Disk Resizing Overview: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn282286.aspx Resize-VirtualDisk cmdlets: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh848658.aspx Storage Quality of Service for Hyper-V: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn282281.aspx Automatic Virtual Machine Activation: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn303421.aspx I mprove Performance of a File Server with SMB Direct: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj134210.aspx Generation 2 Virtual Machine Overview: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn282285.aspx V irtual Machine Connection Enhanced Session Mode Overview: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn282274.aspx
W hats new in Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2012 R2: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn283323.aspx T est Lab Guide: Remote Desktop Services Session Virtualization Quick Start: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831754.aspx T est Lab Guide: Remote Desktop Services Session Virtualization Standard Deployment: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831610.aspx T est Lab Guide: Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Quick Start: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831585.aspx T est Lab Guide: Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Standard Deployment: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831541.aspx T est Lab Guide: Managed Pooled Virtual Desktop Collections: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831663.aspx T est Lab Guide: Unmanaged Pooled Virtual Desktop Collections: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831618.aspx
81
T est Lab Guide: Remote Desktop Services Publishing: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831442.aspx T est Lab Guide: Remote Desktop Services Licensing: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj134160.aspx
Windows PowerShell: http://technet.microsoft.com/library/bb978526.aspx Whats new in Windows PowerShell: http://technet.microsoft.com/library/hh857339.aspx W indows Azure REST API error code guidelines: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/windowsazure/dd179357.aspx
W hats new for Windows Deployment Services in Windows Server 2012 R2: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn281955.aspx Windows Deployment Services Overview: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831764.aspx
W hats new in Active Directory in Windows Server 2012 R2: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn268294.aspx S ecurity and Protection Overview: http://technet.microsoft.com/library/hh831778.aspx W hats new in Group Policy in Windows Server 2012 R2: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn265973.aspx
82
About the Author

Mike Resseler is a Product Strategy Specialist for Veeam. Mike is focused on technologies around Hyper-V and System Center. With years of experience in the field, he presents on many occasions at large events such as MMS, TechEd and TechDays. Mike has been awarded the MVP for System Center Cloud and Datacenter Management since 2010. His major hobby is discussing and developing solid disaster recovery scenarios. Additionally, he has enterprise-class experience in private cloud architecture and deployment, with marked focus on protection from the bottom to the top. He holds certifications in many Microsoft Technologies such as MCITP. Follow Mike on @MikeResseler or @Veeam and on Google+.
About Veeam Software

Veeam is Modern Data Protection. We believe todays IT requirements have changed and that 3C legacy backup problemshigh costs, increased complexity and missing capabilitiesare no longer acceptable for any organization. Veeam provides powerful, easy-to-use and affordable solutions that are Built for Virtualization and the clouda perfect fit for the modern datacenter. Veeam Backup & Replication is VMware backup, Hyper-V backup, recovery and replication. This #1 VM Backup solution helps organizations meet RPOs and RTOs, save time, eliminate risks and dramatically reduce capital and operational costs. Veeam Backup Management Suite combines Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam ONE in a single integrated solution to protect virtualization investments, increase administrator productivity and help mitigate daily management risks. Veeam Management Pack (MP) extends enterprise monitoring to VMware through Microsoft System Center. Veeam also provides free tools for the virtualization community. Learn more by visiting http://www.veeam.com.
83
Modern Data Protection

Powerful Easy-to-Use
Built for Virtualization
Veeam Backup & Replication

#1 VM Backup for VMware and Hyper-V
Virtualization changes everything especially backup. If youve virtualized on VMware or Hyper-V, now is the time to move up to the data protection solution Built for Virtualization: Veeam Backup & Replication. Unlike traditional backup that suers from the 3C problem (missing capabilities, complexity and cost), Veeam is: Powerful: Restore an entire virtual machine (VM) or an individual le, email or database record in 2 minutes Easy-to-Use: It just works! Aordable: No agents to license or maintain, works with your existing storage, and includes deduplication, VM replication, Microsoft Exchange recovery, and more! Join the 58,000 organizations who have already modernized their data protection with Veeam. Download Veeam Backup & Replication today!
GOLD AWARD
NEW TECHNOLOGY
GOLD AWARD
NEW TECHNOLOGY
To learn more, visit http://www.veeam.com/backup
84

Ebook Whats New in Windows Server 12

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Titolo originale

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Ebook Whats New in Windows Server 12

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

Modern Data Protection

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

The era of the cloud OS

Transform the datacenter

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

Enable modern business applications

Unlock insights on any data

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

Chapter 1: File services and storage

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

Individual work data

Team / group work data

Data location Public cloud SharePoint / Oce 365 File server

Table 1: Work Folders / Skydrive / Redirection comparison

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

Figure 1: Work Folders as a role in Windows Server 2012 R2

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

Figure 2: Removing SMB 1.0

DFS Namespace and DFS Replication

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

Figure 3: PowerShell cmdlets for DFS

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

iSCSI Target server

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

Figure 4: Storage spaces comparison. Source: TechEd NA 2013: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/MDC-B218#fbid=p6SGjtG757M

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

Figure 5: Adding Data Deduplication as a role in Windows Server

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

Figure 6: Additional features in Data Deduplication, source TechEd NA

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

Figure 7: DHCP Policy based on FQDN

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

Figure 8: Policy properties with alternative DNS Suffix

Figure 9: Disable dynamic updates for DNS PTR records

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

Figure 10: DHCP cmdlets

Cmdlet name Add-DhcpServerSecurityGroup Add-DhcpServerv4MulticastExclusionRange Add-DhcpServerv4MulticastScope

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

Get-DhcpServerv4MulticastExclusionRange Get-DhcpServerv4MulticastLease Get-DhcpServerv4MulticastScope Get-DhcpServerv4MulticastScopeStatistics Get-DhcpServerv4SuperscopeStatistics Remove-DhcpServerDnsCredential

New New New New New New

Remove-DhcpServerv4MulticastExclusionRange Remove-DhcpServerv4MulticastLease Remove-DhcpServerv4MulticastScope Rename-DhcpServerv4Superscope Repair-DhcpServerv4IPRecord Set-DhcpServerDnsCredential

New New New New New New

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

Figure 11: DNS statistics

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

Figure 12: DNS Zone Statistics

5. For more information on DNSSEC: http://technet.microsoft.com/library/jj200221.aspx

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

Figure 13: IPAM - Default Roles

Whats new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview

Figure 14: IPAM - Scoping a user role

Figure 15: Defining an Access Scope