Microsoft Windows Server 2012 review

Tim Anderson Read more December 22, 2012

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The Windows 8 client may have grabbed all the attention, but it isn’t the only new edition of Windows. Windows Server 2012 (WS2012) is based on the same core code as Windows 8 and is a major release in its own right. Without the distraction of having to reimagine Windows for touch, the server team has focused on new features and refinements.

WS2012 does have the new Start screen, however, as found in the Windows 8 client – the rationale being not only consistency, but also that users may on occasion use tablets for remote administration, so a touch-friendly UI makes sense.

One of the reasons WS2012 is an impressive upgrade is its clear focus. There are two major themes. The first is in the area of deployment and manageability. When Microsoft launched Windows NT 3.1 back in 1993 – the first Windows Server – the presence of a GUI was a key selling point against command-line Unix. Today, though, Microsoft says you should install Windows Server without a GUI if possible, and has made plenty of changes to enable that.

Windows Server 2012 Essentials

Microsoft no longer sells its Small Business Server edition of Windows Server – instead, it’s now offering Windows Server 2012 Essentials. It’s designed for small businesses and deviates from Server 2012 in several key ways, and it also includes Office 365. To discover what’s changed and if it’s worth buying, click here.

There are two reasons for deprecating a server GUI. One is security, since a GUI increases the attack surface and tempts administrators to do risky things such as browsing the web. The other is manageability. Command lines can be scripted, making tasks easy to repeat and adapt on the same or other servers.
WS2012 enables this with a much-improved PowerShell automation engine. More than 2,300 cmdlets (PowerShell commands) have been added, and everything works remotely as well as locally. PowerShell now has a workflow engine, too.

Microsoft has made strides in its effort to modularise Windows Server, so that you install only the components you need. You can now move from Server Core, which has no GUI at all, to a full server GUI and back simply by adding and removing components – something that wasn’t possible before. There’s also now a Minimal Server Interface option between Server Core and the full GUI. The minimal GUI has no desktop, Explorer or web browser, but does support GUI applications including Server Manager, Microsoft Management Console and most of Control Panel. The drive towards Server Core, however, is spoiled by the fact that some roles, such as Application Server, require at least the minimal GUI.

If you do manage to rid your installation of the GUI, you don’t have to use PowerShell for everything: you can use the new Remote Server Administration Tools and run Server Manager and other management tools that come with Windows 8. Some operations, such as checking the Event Viewer, are easier using a GUI tool, and the improved Server Manager makes this easier to do than ever before. It enables administrators to monitor more than one server simultaneously, and indicates at a glance which are okay and which have errors.

The second major focus is virtualisation. Hyper-V, Microsoft’s virtualisation platform, is greatly improved in this release. Limitations have been lifted: virtual hard disks are up to 64TB; RAM is up to 512GB in a VM and 2TB of RAM on the host; virtual processors up to 32 in a VM and 160 on the host. The old VHD format didn’t work on hard disks of more than 2TB because it lacked support for 4K disk sector sizes; this has now been fixed.

The best new feature in Hyper-V is Replica support. Nothing is required beyond two Hyper-V hosts with replication enabled. Right-click a VM in Hyper-V Manager, select Enable Replication, and you can set up a VM that’s resilient to hardware failure. This increases network traffic, as you’d expect, and Microsoft recommends excluding virtual disks used for paging files. Moving VMs is also easier, with live migration now supported without the need for clustered storage.

A word to the wise, though: the old Server 2008 Hyper-V Manager can’t be used with Server 2012 Hyper-V hosts, and the same is true the other way around.

One interesting new feature of WS2012 is Storage Spaces, which enable the creation of a pool of physical drives with optional resiliency through either drive mirroring or parity striping. Virtual drives can be created on the pool, which can be bigger than the physical drive space available, a feature known as thin provisioning. When the physical space is exhausted, more can be added to the pool.

Among around 300 new features are also DHCP failover, DirectAccess connections even behind a single network interface card (NIC), NIC teaming, simplified management for Remote Desktop Services, extensible virtual switches and virtual Fibre Channel adapters in Hyper-V, built-in data deduplication and offloaded data transfer for fast storage operations on a storage area network (SAN).

Finally, there are the changes to the way WS2012 is licensed, moving to per-processor licences, which is perhaps just as critical as all the new features.

There are now four main editions: Foundation is an OEM version that allows up to 15 users; Essentials allows up to 25 users and replaces Small Business Server; Standard uses a client access licence (CAL) model and covers up to two processors plus two virtual instances; and Datacenter permits up to two processors per licence and unlimited virtual instances. The idea is that you use multiple licences on a single box, so with four processors you’d need either two Standard or two Datacenter licences. Other editions include the free Hyper-V Server, with full Hyper-V features including Replica.

However, there will be winners and losers with the new licensing model. The free Hyper-V Server edition is a bargain, but unless you run only Linux VMs, Microsoft still gets your money from licences for the guest VMs. Businesses that choose to run many VMs in order to keep each one focused on a single role really need the Datacenter edition, which covers unlimited VMs, but the price is substantial. Essentials is a good deal, but presents expanding businesses with a hefty upgrade bill once they break the 25-user mark. Standard is fair value, but it may push administrators towards trying to save licence costs by combining too many roles on each VM, regardless of best practice.

Is it worth upgrading? Provided your applications support it, there’s plenty here to whet the average administrator’s whistle. However, with such dramatic changes to the licensing model, it pays to work out the various permutations carefully before you commit.