What Is Windows Server 2016?

Juniya Sankara

March 19, 2018

Windows 10 Server Dashboard Preview

Hello everyone, how are you all doing today? I am doing fine, I just wish I had more hours in the day to get things done or sleep, anyone agree? Who decided that only 24 hours should be in a day? I better stop before one of you mathematicians attempts to explain to me why, lol anyway read on…

Today we will highlight a great solution for anyone who is interested in data center protection, web hosting, cloud, .NET, ASP, visualization, PHP, SQL etc. I am talking about the awesome Windows Server 2016. Let’s find out what makes Windows Server 2016 a good solution for you.

Windows 2016 Features

Windows Server 2016 (formerly Windows Server vNext) is a server operating system developed by Microsoft as part of the Windows NT family of operating systems, developed concurrently with Windows 10. The first early preview version (Technical Preview) became available on 1 October 2014 together with the first technical preview of System Center, and is currently in public beta testing. The final release date for the server is expected to be in early 2016.

Windows Server Features

Active Directory Federation Services: possible to configure AD FS to authenticate users stored in non-AD directories, such as X.500 compliant Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directories and SQL databases
Windows Defender: Windows Server Antimalware is installed and enabled by default without the GUI, which is an installable Windows feature.
Remote Desktop Services: support for OpenGL 4.4 and OpenCL 1.1, performance and stability improvements; MultiPoint Services role (see Windows MultiPoint Server)
Storage Services: central Storage QoS Policies; Storage Replicas (storage-agnostic, block-level, volume-based, synchronous and asynchronous replication using SMB3between servers for disaster recovery). Storage Replica replicates blocks instead of files; files can be in use. It’s not multi-master, not one-to-many and not transitive. It periodically replicates snapshots, and the replication direction can be changed.
Failover Clustering: cluster operating system rolling upgrade, Storage Replicas
Web Application Proxy: preauthentication for HTTP Basic application publishing, wildcard domain publishing of applications, HTTP to HTTPS redirection, Propagation of client IP address to backend applications
IIS 10: Support for HTTP/2
Windows PowerShell 5.0
Soft Restart, a Windows feature to speed up the booting process by skipping hardware initialization, and resetting software only.
Telnet server is not included.

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New or changed Networking Features

DHCP: as Network Access Protection was deprecated in Windows Server 2012 R2, in Window Server 2016 the DHCP role no longer supports NAP
DNS:
- DNS client: service binding – enhanced support for computers with more than one network interface
- DNS Server: DNS policies, new DDS record types (TLSA, SPF, and unknown records), new PowerShell cmdlets and parameters
Windows Server Gateway now supports Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) tunnels
IP address management (IPAM): support for /31, /32, and /128 subnets; discovery of file-based, domain-joined DNS servers; new DNS functions; better integration of DNS, DHCP, and IP Address (DDI) Management
Network Controller, a new server role to configure, manage, monitor, and troubleshoot virtual and physical network devices and services in the datacenter
Hyper-V Network Virtualization: programmable Hyper-V switch (a new building block of Microsoft’s software-defined networking solution); VXLAN encapsulation support; Microsoft Software Load Balancer interoperability; better IEEE Ethernet standard compliancy

New Hyper-V Features

Rolling Hyper-V cluster update: unlike upgrading clusters from Windows 2008 R2 to 2012 level, Windows Server Technical Preview cluster nodes can be added to a Hyper-V Cluster with nodes running Windows Server 2012 R2. The cluster continues to function at a Windows Server 2012 R2 feature level until all of the nodes in the cluster have been upgraded and the cluster functional level has been upgraded.
Storage quality of service (QoS) to centrally monitor end-to-end storage performance and create policies using Hyper-V and Scale-Out File Servers
New, more efficient binary virtual machine configuration format (.VMCX extension for virtual machine configuration data and the .VMRS extension for runtime state data)
Production checkpoints
Hyper-V Manager: alternate credentials support, down-level management, WS-Management protocol
Integration services for Windows guests distributed through Windows Update
Hot add and remove for network adapters (for generation 2 virtual machines) and memory (for generation 1 and generation 2 virtual machines)
Linux secure boot
Connected Standby compatibility

Nano Server

Microsoft announced a new installation option, codenamed Nano Server, a minimal footprint installation option of Windows Server, optimized for Windows Server Containers andHyper-V Containers, as well as other cloud-optimized scenarios. According to the announcement, Microsoft removed the GUI stack, 32-bit support (WoW64), MSI and a number of default Server Core components. There is no local logon or Remote Desktop support. All management is performed remotely via WMI and PowerShell.

Windows Server is the platform for building an infrastructure of connected applications, networks, and web services, from the workgroup to the data center.

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