Recently I was watching a video from TechEd 2013 by Ben Armstrong…..and according to his projection of Windows Server 2012 R2 which is getting released soon; coming with a boat load of new features.
At first the one new improvement that caught my attentions is that Windows Server 2012 R2 will auto activate all the VM’s inside as soon as the parent gets activated. This is a brand new feature of Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2. Which means you are not going to need to activate each VM. When the base OS gets activated (host environment); the activation process will activate all the VM’s within.
Some of the key highlights (improved areas) in the new R2 OS:
- Zero touch activation of Virtual Machines
- Generation 2 VM’s
- Hyper-V Replica
- Shared Nothing Live Migration
- Support for VM’s on SMB 3.0
- Full PowerShell Support
- Live Migration Compression is Enabled by default
- If your live migration network is 10Gb or less, use compression
- If your live migration network is over 10Gb, use of SMB or SMB direct is recommended.
A Server running on SSD drive, blazing with IOPS. This is a screenshot from the real life stream.
Virtualization on Hyper-V 2012 R2 Improvements:
- Cross-version live migration
- Online VHDX resize
- Automatic VM activation
- Live VM export/cloning
- Remote Access console via VMBus (does not rely on RDS or networking)
- Live migration compression
- Live migration with RDMA
- More robust Linux support
Windows Server 2012 Storage Improvements:
- Windows Storage Spaces now features block-level automated data tiering
- Data de-duplication enhanced in R2 (now with running VMs)
- Flexible resiliency options (enhanced in R2) – Three way mirrors, write-back cache,
- Pooling of disks