J U M P S Ta R T

J U M P S TA R T

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Chapter 1

Understanding Windows Server 2012
Organizations today face drivers and pressures like no other time before to deliver more while spending less. And often no department in the company feels that more than the IT department. The need to do more with less is causing IT to look at the resources available to them and explore ways to maximize their existinginvestments, and nothing showcases this better than the Windows Server operating system. Windows Server has evolved from an operating system providing basic capabilities that are leveraged by other services to a platform for both on-premise and off-premise solutions enabling organizational initiatives such as the cloud and bring-your-own-device (BYODS) using nothing but in-box functionality.

KeyTrends and Challenges for organizations today

In talking to CTOs and IT directors about what’s on their minds we find two key trends: the cloud and mobility of the workforce. If expanded further, these trends encompass four primary areas: • Increasing the efficiency of the datacenter in terms of maximizing the available resources but also reducing provisioning times for new services • Leveragingand providing cloud services, including both public and private clouds • Delivering applications to users and customers using web technologies • Enabling the new generation of workforce who are highly technically savvy, have multiple devices and work from anywhere and anything Windows Server 2012 provides a huge number of new capabilities that can be used to provide solutions for these fourprimary areas and more, which you will learn about in this book. We’ll focus on areas such as server and desktop virtualization, high availability, disaster recovery, management innovation, networking, and storage changes. This chapter introduces some of the key Windows Server 2012 technologies that will be discussed further in the book as they relate to solving these key challenges and enabling thefuture trends—with a focus on virtualization related concepts.

Increasing the Efficiency of the Datacenter

The datacenter is a well-established component of most companies. However, the importance of the datacenter has sky rocketed as IT forms the foundation of nearly all new initiatives within a company, making increased efficiency critical. Not only does the datacenter need to provide anincreased number of services on a greater amount of hardware while minimizing wasted resources, it also has to deliver services faster and in new ways, including being able to host multiple tenants on a single physical infrastructure with complete isolation.
Windows Server 2012 Jump Start sponsored by EMC

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Consistency is one of the key tenants tostreamlining an IT environment and avoiding having different provisioning and maintenance processes for the various elements of the datacenter. This has led to a virtual first approach for organizations where all workloads are virtualized using server virtualization, unless there is a reason they can’t be. Unfortunately, before Windows Server 2012 and the latest generation of hypervisortechnology there were many workloads that did not fit the capabilities and scalability of server virtualization (e.g., services with very high CPU or memory requirements, the need to directly connect to fibre channel storage for clustering or raw storage requirements that cannot be met with virtual hard disks, bare-metal levels of network performance and the ability to completely isolate certainworkloads). This led to some workloads being virtualized while others remained physical deployments.

Scalability Improvements

Windows Server 2012 brings a new level of capability and scalability to both physical and virtual environments. First, from a raw scalability perspective, the change from Windows Server 2008 R2 to Windows Server 2012 shows magnitudes of improvement (showcased in the table...