This video will look at 9 of the biggest new features in Windows Server 2012. Understanding what is available will help decide if Windows Server 2012 is the right choice for you. Download the PDF handout http://itfreetraining.com/handouts/server/new-2012.pdf New Features This video will look at the following new features in Windows Server 2012. Server 2012 Interfaces, Server Core, Server Manager, Storage Spaces, Resilient File System (ReFS), SMB 3.0, DirectAccess, Hyper-V improvements and RemoteFX improvements. Server 2012 Interfaces Windows Server 2008 introduced the core interface. The choice of whether to use the full GUI interface or the server core interface had to be made at install time and could not be changed. With Windows Server 2012 you can change the interface at any time. To change the interface, it is a simple matter of removing and adding features using server manager, rebooting the server, and then the interface will be changed. Windows Server 2012 also adds an additional interface called the minimal interface. This reduces some of the more intensive graphical options but still allows access to tools like Server Manager. The minimal interface provides an interface between the full and server core interface. Server Manager Windows Server 2012 offers a lot of improvements to server manager as well as changing the interface look and feel. The difference with server manager is that you can manage multiple servers in the one pool. For example, if you want to install a particular role on a group of servers, you could put these servers in the one pool and install the role to all these servers in one go. The interface in server manager has changed so that there is a tile for each role installed on the server. There are also menus on the left hand side that allow quick access to configuration features available for that role. Storage Spaces This is a feature available in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. It allows for multiple drives to be combined together to form one logical unit of storage. The drives used can be internal or external or a combination of the two. Storage space allows redundancy to be configured so that if a drive was to fail, the failed drive could be replaced and no data would be lost. Storage spaces also supports thin provision. This is when the drive is stored in a file rather than a block of data which can increase in size as more data is added. ReFS NTFS was introduced in Windows NT in 1993. Since then it has been expanded and developed as required, however a new approach was required for modern computing. Microsoft has introduced the Resilient File System (ReFS) as a replacement for NTFS. Since it is a replacement for NTFS, it is considered to be a next generation file system. The main feature is that it allows the file system to be self-healing which means problems can be corrected without the need to reboot the computer. NTFS has introduced simpler features but due to the fundamental way it was originally designed, it has had limited success at making these features work. Since the file system is new, it requires Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012. ReFS, at this stage, does not support the following features, booting the operating system, disk quotas, EFS encryption and compression. SMB 3.0 Server Message Block (SMB) is the protocol used to share folders. With Windows Server 2012 there is a new version of the protocol called SMB 3.0. There are a number of enhancements to the protocol to allow the protocol to work over the network better in particular with virtual machines. The most noticeable new feature is the protocol now has the ability to work at the block level. Previously if you wanted to work at the block level over the network you would have needed a protocol like ISCSI. SMB 3.0 also adds support for high availability features including transparent failover and SMB multichannel. Transparency failover means that when a server fails in a cluster and the user is moved to a different server, this process should be transparent to the user and they should not notice an outage. SMB multichannel means that multi-channel can be combined together to form one channel, which increases the data throughput. For the rest of the description please see http://itfreetraining.com/server#new-2012 See http://YouTube.com/ITFreeTraining or http://itfreetraining.com for our always free training videos. This is only one video from the many free courses available on YouTube. References "What's New in Windows Server 2012" http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831769.aspx "Windows Server Installation Options" http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831786.aspx

• published: 20 Oct 2013
• views: 233