Following on from the release of Windows Server 2012 and the plethora of improvements that it brought for the cloud hosting environment, Windows Server 2012 R2 is soon to be released.
The preview will be available soon and we are getting excited at some of the new features that are being touted especially those within the virtualisation category:
Generation 2 VMs remove all of the legacy, BIOS-based functionality of traditional VMs.
These VMs are UEFI-based, have no emulated devices, can boot off virtual iSCSI and network adapters, and support secure boot. The benefits to using Generation 2 VMs will be numerous, including the potential of vastly reduced VM sizes by eliminating support for legacy, BIOS-based overhead. Of course you will still be able to run your current VMs.
This will greatly reduce the time it takes to migrate a virtual machine across the network. Hyper-V will also monitor the host’s CPU and prioritise resources to the guest services.
You will now be able to resize your VM’s VHDX files whilst the machine is running. No more need for a shutdown.
This will make it possible to determine storage requirements of VMs and put limits on their storage IOPS activity. Great for shared storage with a large number of VMs.
Hyper-V will allow you to create an exact copy of a VM that is in a stored machine. Great if you need to debug a production server for example or just to create a quick backup.
Improved memory management for Linux VMs and online backup capabilities are two of the new features related to Linux guest OS VMs.
This feature will allow up to 64 VMs to share a single VHDX file. Can be used to create guest cluster and will work with previous OSs such as Windows Server 2008 R2.
Hyper-V Replica is one of the most used features in the cloud based Windows Server 2012 and its easy to see why. With the pending release of R2 you will be able to increase the replication frequency to every 30 seconds and also replicate to a 3rd site.
The above are just some of the new features of Windows Server 2012 R2. I’m sure you will agree it’s looking pretty impressive!
As always Secura Hosting will be one of the first UK web hosting companies to provide cloud hosting solutions built on this release. For more information please contact us at 0207 183 2540 or take a look at our existing cloud hosting solutions here: Cloud Services.
John is Operations Director at Secura and a Windows Server expert. Before all things IIS related, he was also a champion powerlifter.
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