Windows Server 2012 features | Hacker News Reader

Windows Server 2012 features

theregister.co.uk

34 pointsAndrewDucker35 comments

Hold on!

Microsoft has a Windows Server edition (not to be confused with the Hyper-V feature itself) called "Hyper-V Server 2012" that is free (runs the Core role and is CLI only), and you can virtualize it (with itself) to as many VMs as you'd like?

http://blogs.technet.com/b/keithmayer/archive/2012/09/07/get...

That's huge!

Neat, a direct competitor to the VMWare's free VShere Hypervisor.

Still no PCI passthrough support though, right?

Doesn't look like it has - http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverhy...

All of that was true for older editions as well (2008, 2008R2). Of course, the 2012 version has a lot of new features!

This article reads like a Microsoft advertisement.

He does a poor job selling the new features of Server 2012, and some of the features like Powershell 3 are available on 2008 R2, heck even Windows 7.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=3459...

His point about Powershell was this:

"Every element of the operating system and virtually every other companion server, such as SQL, Exchange or Lync, are completely manageable through PowerShell. This is so ingrained that the GUIs are just buttons that call PowerShell scripts underneath."

Which sounds exclusive to Server 2012.

It isn't exclusive to 2012. It is exclusive to the product its self.

If the product will only run on 2012 then it is exclusive to 2012, but otherwise it will work fine on 2008 R2.

yea, but IIS, HyperV and any internal features to the OS (DNS Server, DHCP, ActiveDirectory, etc) all, on 2012, have Powershell support, but not necessarily on 2008 R2.

Right, but much of it is. Powershell has been a core part of Windows server and its respective components for a while.

"Windows Server 2008/R2 shipped with ~230 cmdlets. Windows Server 2012 beats that by a factor of over 10 shipping ~ 2,430 cmdlets."

http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsserver/archive/2012/05/30/...

I think what makes powershell a bigger feature w/ 2012 is really the new server management stuff. Basically you can go through the normal configuration you would do for the server, and then save out that configuration to a file, and then using powershell you can push out that configuration to multiple servers simultaneously.

I thought one of the coolest feature was the ability to add and remove the entire UI:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/klince/archive/2012/04/02/windows...

In short, the previous Standard / Core SKUs are gone, and you can switch between them as required.

Yeah, this is a nice feature that is quite useful. While you can install SQL Server on core through powershell, it's a lot simpler to just upgrade and use the GUI then downgrade back to core.

Hard to take it seriously when they start off by suggesting that the web server, by itself, makes it a good investment. I have nothing against IIS (I think handlers written in C# is a solid feature compared to the alternatives for other servers)...but at best IIS is as good as many free alternatives. Maybe they mean within the context of ASP.NET hosting, but they really should make that clear (and if so, say how, exactly, it's better for ASP.NET).

I do not read this as a pitch for people currently running nginx to move to Windows. Instead it is targeted, it seems, at people running prior versions of Windows, and who have various reasons to prefer to continue with that platform. I don't quite buy the "this ends the jokes" bit, as the jokes ended long ago (the world was once awash with IIS exploits. It has been a rock-solid, high-performance platform since IIS 6.0, if not before).

Microsoft licensing costs are a rounding error compared to the cost of employees for a business.

"Free" and "Alternative" are valid comparison terms if you are thinking of industries such as Shared Hosting and use-cases of PHP.

There is a reason why MS makes the billions it does every year with "free alternatives" on the market... Because they solve a lot of problems for some people.

> Microsoft licensing costs are a rounding error compared to the cost of employees for a business.

That's not true for the product editions labeled "enterprise" or "ultimate". Just look at SQL Server Enterprise.

Oddly, "Modern UI" (ie Metro) isn't in this list. Surely that's what every server admin needs, no?

Yeah, nothing beats trying to hover over a corner to get to the start menu in the midst of a panicked admin session...

The reason for not knowing the proper keyboard shortcut might also explain why this is a "panicked" session.

The keyboard shortcuts don't work in a less-than-fullscreen terminal server session. That's where a lot of my admin work happens, and having to hover over that corner sucks.

Keyboard shortcuts like Alt+Home(Start Screen) and Ctrl+Alt+End(=Ctrl+Alt+Del) should still work.

That only appears to work through one level. Right now I'm remote-desktoping a physical computer and have a Hyper-V VM open on that. Alt+Home will pass through to the VM only if the remote-desktop session to the host is full-screen.

Or perhaps keyboard shortcuts don't work so well when accessing the server via vSphere Client console running in an RDP session.

I think the really operative phrase in this article is:

"Once you have assembled the list of scriptlets you need – printed, laminated and guarded by a fire elemental as in days of old – you can make the 2012 stack of Microsoft software sing."

My biggest issue with using windows server 2012 is the cognitive dissonance encountered when using the product. Are they trying to go more like unix and use command line scripts (e.g: powershell)? It sure seems that way. However, they also bolted on the most horrid and inappropriate UI ever onto the product. Is there some reason a hierarchical menu system doesn't make sense for an admin? Do they adopt a sensible convention of making all the configuration text editable? Is built in remote command line administration present (e.g: ssh?) It doesn't seem like it.

As a competent linux admin and novice windows server admin it seems very confusing.

And don't get me started on hyper-V. I really tried to use and spent almost a day of investigation. However, there really is nothing for documentation. With ESXI you download it, install, connect vmware fusion, and start working. Done. Couldn't figure out how to do that hyper-V.

Have you already looked at this - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc732470(v=ws.10)...

I think so. I do recall attempting to install the hyper-V on a server core installation. However, I think the problem was that the management tools required either windows server 2008 (which I didn't have) or Vista (which I didn't have). I don't know why the management tools aren't just a win32 binary (like VWWare Vsphere).

It seems that CSVs still require a shared storage system. The biggest thing I miss on Windows is a DRBD equivalent. I want to take a couple servers, and have them sync up their disks over the network - no need for a single point of failure SAN.

What's the scenario exactly? You can't make use of AD and DFS?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_File_System_(Micros...

DRBD gives me a block device that's mirrored on 2 or 3 machines. DFS is like a file-level replication system or something. For instance, I can use DRBD as an iSCSI target for instance and then failover SQL Server. Or I can use any other app that requires no possibility of conflicts or uses open files.

AFAIK, Microsoft still has no solution in this case but to introduce a single point of failure via a SAN or other shared storage. I'd love to be wrong.

Does it have SSH access yet? Or, does PowerShell have an encrypted remove protocol?

Yes, remote PowerShell is basically like SSH and is based on Win-RM. It can be encrypted with SSL.

So, nothing new, then?

I have been running Windows Server 2012 (Standard) as my main desktop for the past couple of months and I absolutely love it... I installed it onto an IBM x3100 M4 open box special ($400!) that I had picked up and after I added 32GB of RAM, an nVidia Quadro 600 and 5 (JBOD-configured) hard drives to it, the thing absolutely flies. Last night I had 2 VMs running in the background, 1 XP the another with an install of Win7 in progress and meanwhile I was playing a game of WoW on high-quality.

I did not replace the start menu because I like the big tiled-display. The only thing I miss on this new start screen is Jump Lists because I do not pin things to the task-bar (I prefer quick-launch), so Jump Lists are effectively useless to me now. The only usability tweaks I installed are: 7 Taskbar Tweaker and AutoHotKey. Other than that, the thing just works.

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