Windows Server 8: The Ultimate Cloud OS

I would HIGHLY RECOMMEND you read this Jason Perlow’s blog on Windows Server 8.

https://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/windows-server-8-the-ultimate-cloud-os/18594

Just one quote out of the article

“As to be expected of a Cloud-optimized Windows Server release, many enhancements are going to come in the form of improvements to Hyper-V. And boy are they big ones.

For starters, Hyper-V will now support up to 32 processors and 512GB of RAM per VM. In order to accomodate larger virtual disks, a new virtual file format, .VHDX, will be introduced and will allow for virtual disk files greater than 2 terabytes.

Not impressed? How about63-node Hyper-V clusters that can run up to 4000 concurrent VMs simultaneously? No, I’m not joking. They actually showed it to us, for real, and it was working flawlessly.

Live Migration in Hyper-V has also been greatly enhanced — to the point where clustered storage isn’t even required to do a VM migration anymore.

Microsoft demonstrated the ability to literally “beam” — a la Star Trek — a virtual machine between two Hyper-V hosts with only an IP connection.”

The list of Hyper-V features goes on and on. A new Open Extensible Virtual Switch will allow 3rd-parties to plug into Hyper-V’s switch architecture. SR-IOV for privileged access to PCI devices has now been implemented as well as CPU metering and resource pools, which should be a welcome addition to anyone currently using them in existing VMWare environments to portion out virtual infrastructure.

This includes Port ACLs that can block by source and destination VM, implementations of Private VLANs (PVLAN), network resource pools and open network QoS as well as packet-level IP re-write with GRE encapsulation and consistent device naming.

Multi-Path I/O (MPIO) drivers (such as EMC’s PowerPath and IBM’s SDDPCM) when combined with Microsoft’s virtual HBA provider can also now be installed as virtualized fiber channel host bus adapters (HBA) within virtual machines, in order to take better advantage of the performance of enterprise SAN hardware and for VMs to have direct access to SAN LUNs.

Windows Server 8 will also include improved Offloaded Data Transfer, so that when you drag and drop files between two server windows, the server OS knows to transfer data directly from one system to another, rather than passing it through your workstation or through another server.