Windows Server Essentials Technical Preview 2 Cloud Integration Services

With the updated Technical Preview for Windows Server, we can take a look at some of the changes that are now in the Essentials component. There are no major surprises here, instead we see a natural extension into additional services that Microsoft's Azure platform now delivers. This will just be a high level overview, I'll dig into the newer components in a new series of posts.

From a user interface perspective, no major changes, but there are a couple of new options in the Microsoft Cloud Services Integration section, but the Azure Active Directory capabilities are still top of the list.

Making a welcome return is the Office 365 integration component. I've written about this in detail in the past, and I'll revisit this again in the future to highlight changes.

Intune integration is another returning option, a future post will highlight what that brings to the table.

Now we get into the first new addition - support for Azure Virtual Networks. There are several scenarios that this will help enable, such as hybrid RemoteApp deployments and other cloud based workloads, but I'll dig into these in more detail in a coming post.

Azure Backup returns, and I'll post more details in an upcoming post.

The final option, and one that is going to provide some very interesting scenarios, is the Azure Recovery capability. This integration with the Azure Site Recovery capabilities, based on Hyper-V Replica, start to provide some great options for SMB customers who need to have copies of their internal infrastructure safely replicated to a remote datacentre. Again this is another topic I'll do a deeper dive into in a future post.