Today Ashley & I are in Hammersmith, West London for the Technical Launch of Windows Server 2012 which went General Availability on September 4th.
Windows Server 2012 (built from the Cloud up) is arguably the most exciting Windows Server release yet and it’s no surprise the event is packed, indeed standing room only!
As usual for our posts, we’ll list the official agenda and then use it to structure our comment later, the agenda for the day was listed as:
Agenda: Windows Server 2012- Microsoft Launch Event
09.00 Welcome & Registration
10.00 Keynote & Kickoff
11.00 Beyond Virtualization
12.00 Lunch
13.15 Power of Many Servers Simplicity of One
14.15 Any App Any Cloud
15.15 Break
15.45 Anywhere Working
16.45 Closing Drinks & Networking
Delivered by Microsoft global executives in partnership with Microsoft Most Valued Professionals (MVPs), Partners and the Windows Server User Group, at this event you’ll get:
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Technical sessions on Windows Server 2012 |
Opportunities to ask Microsoft your questions |
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Networking with Microsoft, Partners and MVPs |
Information on resources to get certified |
Windows Server 2012 Key Facts
Windows Server powers many of the worlds’ largest datacenters, enables small businesses around the world, and delivers value to organizations of all sizes in between. Building on this legacy, Windows Server 2012 delivers hundreds of new features and enhancements spanning virtualization, networking, storage, user experience, cloud computing, automation, and more.
Windows Server 2012 will help you transform your IT operations to reduce costs and deliver a whole new level of business value. This is quite possibly the most significant release of Windows Server ever.
Windows Server 2012 brings Microsoft’s experience from building and operating public clouds to deliver a highly dynamic, available, and cost-effective server platform for private and service provider clouds, offering a multi-tenant aware cloud infrastructure that helps organisations connect more securely across premises and allows IT to respond to business needs faster and more efficiently.
Windows Server 2012, together with System Center 2012, presents many opportunities that will enable you to solve fundamental business and IT challenges.
“Nothing from Microsoft, and I mean literally nothing has ever been this ambitious”, proclaims ZDNet.
“Takes your breath away” says Computerworld.
Our notes and observations on the day
Keynote Kickoff
Morris Martin
Morris opened the event, and set the scene of change with a story of how just 30 years ago he did a paper round which paid for his Oric Atmos memory upgrades… to just 8K!
Today, Virtual Machine memory support in Server 2012 is a whopping 1TB!!
(he’s obviously a little older than me.. as a boy I had use of a Sinclair ZX81 (1K), however my own first computer was a 1st generation Spectrum and that shipped with double Morris’s upgrade, a huge 16K!
Torri Widsteen
Marketing, Windows Server
Been in Windows Server for 7 years and 13 at Microsoft so has seen a lot of change, but this is a really big year for Microsoft with major releases in SQL Server 2012, Visual Studio, Windows Server, and Windows 8 coming up in October, plus continual improvements to Azure
BYOD – she brought 3 devices over on the plane, and of course IT do not expect security compromised with her desire and ability to use whatever device is to hand – corporate IT supplied or not.
Bing running on WS2012 since pre-launch serving 5.5B queries a month
Market is excited about this release, events have been standing room only, 1m website hits in a week and great critical reviews
Early Adopters – Paul Smith (no surprise there – what RDP have they not been involved in!?!? ;-), Intel, Newham Council. Supporting partners include Inframon, Intercept IT, OCSL, Trinity IT (but lets not mention the competition too much!)
Jeff Woolsey (@WSV_GUY) – Principal Program Manager, Windows Server
the numbers are bigger than ever before, and bigger pissing than VMware, even the latest announcements at VMworld
TechNet has been running on Hyper-V since the beta of WS2008
“If you want to use the other guys you’ll have to buy Enterprise Super Special Plus Edition” 
What is off bounds to virtualisation with Server 2012? Virtualise EVERYTHING!
Game changing technology – network virtualisation (true!)
VLAN sprawl, abused since 1995 – customers with 100’s or even 1000’s of VLANs (we helped audit a large UK based utility company with nearly a hundred and recommended they reduce!)
Cluster Aware Updates – up to 64 nodes & 8,000 VMs in a cluster can cause a patching headache – now automated (schedule or on demand)
Immersive Data Experience from e.g. Excel to SQL to Hadoop
Dynamic Access Control for information protection – link to auditing
Improvements to VDI – pooled vs personalised VDI (throw away and start clean vs. keep personal settings)
RemoteFX big improvements in WAN optimisation & touch
Demo using a Windows 8 tablet – allegedly his, however the logged in user was Ben Smith. Got a laugh out of the audience mentioning its capabilities inc. support for Flash.. clearly using a mouse for the demo though
Offloaded Data Transfer (ODX) – SAN compatibility to offload file/storage operations to the SAN. Hyper-V supports and will improve operations such as live migrations, etc.
Dynamic Memory – Live changes!
QoS support in Hyper-V to allow resource management
SMB 3.0 improvements to File Services – 16Gbits/s (4x DVD’s per second!), block level storage for SQL, Exchange, etc. Storage Virtualisation to allow flexible change
Network Virtualisation – allows portability of VM’s across IP networks without downtime
Live server & Azure demo and it worked!
Back to Torri – MS Sales event in Redmond with 15,000 sellers – gave Server Tools demo the highest rating (a first, is usually X-Box and the sexier stuff.. slates, etc.)
Commitment to the market
Beyond Virtualization
Andrew Fryer & Aidan (MVP in Virtual Machine)
Business drivers for going Cloud – save money (licenses, time & effort, availability, scalability, performance)
Business concerns for going Cloud – security in multi-tenant, both from each other and the hoster from the clients
Ubuntu comes with ICS built in to kernel, rumour has it Red Hat coming too.. (Ashley confirm, we have contacts.. 
)
Seriously Scary Scale-out stats – applies to all versions inc. free Hyper-V Server (slide needed – ask Sarah)
Live migration now prioritises idle memory pages, leaving the active pages to the end, reducing the number of iterations needed and improving the performance of Live Migrations
HA File Stores
Live Migration demo using a file share – worked
Hyper-V Replica – didn’t work, but Andrew asked to take it on faith it works… (we know it does as we saw it at the UK IT Camp event just a couple of weeks ago)
VHDX scales to 64TB (that’s 32x more than anyone else), 4K sector aligned and aware of native 4KB disks – can reduce write latency by a whole disk revolution!
Extending the Hyper-V Extensible Switch – can pretend to be a vendors switch – fully extensible, supports firewall capability, port mirroring, etc.
SRV-IO
Improvements to networking such as DHCP, Router Guard, Bandwidth management, NIC Teaming, port mirroring, etc.
Power of Many Servers Simplicity of One
Simon May & Thomas (MVP in PowerShell?.. ) – Server Management, PowerShell, Storage
PowerShell v3
can be compiled
can be scripted across reboots, e.g. installing forced restart features or roles
“Pervasive scalable scripting”
over 2,600 new cmdlets covering several Windows features previously none-scriptable such as DHCP, DNS, etc.
Support for Script-Sharing & snippets – commonly reusable code snippets
Intellisense – never forget a parameter again!
Storage improvements – Storage Pools, SMB v3, running application servers on file shares e.g. SQL
Any (Every), App Any Cloud
Steve Plank – “Planky” & Damian Flynn (MVP, System Center) – Public & Private Cloud Computing
How do I embrace the Cloud, both Public & Private
Repeatable Cloud Computing – ability to upload configuration files to define the environment
Scalable and Elastic
Scalability & Performance – NUMA aware, Application initialisation,
Increased isolation & Security – IIS CPU Throttling, FTP Logon Attempt restrictions, Dynamic IP Restriction
Simplified Management of Multiple Sites – Centralised SSL support (point your IIS servers at a file share and say get on with it!), Server Name indication, IIS Configuration Editor
Anywhere Working – Modern Workstyle, Enabled
Simon May & Andrew Fryer
Swag…
Of course, swag is good and this event was no exception – bag, torch, pens, stickers and T-shirts – got a small and a double XL (great! – not! )
Closing Drinks & Networking
…which leads nicely onto our good friends at Inframon who were sponsoring the event and who we also partner with for all things System Center
