Windows Server 12 Jump Start

This ebook, sponsored by EMC, will introduce you to all that Windows Server 12 has to offer and how you can get started using it.

CHAPTER 1

Windows Server 2012 provides a huge number of new capabilities that can be used to provide solutions for these four primary areas and more, which you will learn about in this book. We’ll focus on areas such as server and desktop virtualization, high availability, disaster recovery, management innovation, networking, and storage changes. This chapter introduces some of the key Windows Server 2012 technologies that will be discussed further in the book as they relate to solving these key challenges and enabling the future trends—with a focus on virtualization related concepts.

CHAPTER 2

In this chapter you’ll learn about the new features that Windows Server 2012 brings to the organization for improved management and virtualization. Management is of vital importance to ensure that operations are efficient and that IT can quickly respond to user requests as well as quickly troubleshoot problems and deploy new services. Likewise, virtualization, which was once considered a bleeding edge technology, has now become a staple in IT tool chest. Today many organizations deploy all new servers as virtual machines unless they have a specific reason not to. Virtualization enables organization Moreover today virtualization has become the foundation for the cloud and private cloud enabling organization Windows Server 2012 brings many important enhancements to both the area of management and virtualization. 

CHAPTER 3

In any datacenter three key infrastructure elements enable all the capabilities and services offered: compute, storage, and networking. Compute often receives the most press, especially the new version of Hyper-V that enables new levels of scalability for virtual workloads and new scenarios such as shared nothing live migration and replication for disaster recovery scenarios. However, without the right storage and network capabilities what can be achieved is limited. This chapter focuses on key storage and networking features introduced in Windows Server 2012.

CHAPTER 4

Availability of the IT infrastructure has never been more important than it is today. Online services, remote access from anywhere on the planet, and 24x7 operations demand maximum uptime from an operating system. Windows Server 2012 was designed with availability in mind across the operating system's entire architecture. From obvious high availability areas (such as failover clustering) to more subtle areas (such as speeding up CHKDSK repair times), the many availability-related features in Windows Server 2012 can, in aggregate, provide you with much higher availability than you've been able to achieve before. Not only can it get you higher availability, it does this at a lower cost than has ever been possible. This chapter reviews how you can implement this.