Planning A Migration To Windows Server 2012? Everything You Need To Know

While Windows Server 2012 has been available since early September 2012, it is never an easy choice for CIOs to just migrate. Feature sets really define how an enterprise might choose to migrate to a new operating environment.

Microsoft has made a lot of headway in making the choice easier for CIOs and their teams. Not only does Windows server 2012 have features that administrators and CIOs have been waiting for, it really adds a lot of value in the entire process of enterprise technology management.

In a session hosted at Microsoft’s TechEd2013 in Bengaluru, Pracheta Bhunwar, who evangelises Microsoft’s Windows Server platform, gave us her top set of features that would make the decision to switch or migrate to Windows Server 2012 much easier.

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Powershell

It all begins at the shell. In an attempt to make life for administrators more streamlined, Powershell currently at version 3 is the core management engine of Microsoft’s Server 2012. While users only had access to close to 300 CMDlets in Server 2008, they now have over 2400 CMDlets, which makes a massive difference in how they use the platform.

Intellisense allows predictive writing of commands, which really helps in terms of making the life of the administrator more efficient. Users aren’t expected to remember 2000 commands, and Intellisense helps them navigate through the chaos.

GUI Away

As a user of Microsoft’s server product line, haven’t you ever wished that you could just install the core modules without the need of the GUI? Well someone at Microsoft just heard your prayers, and Windows Server 2012 now comes with a GUI-less install option.

The way this works is that while the installer itself is GUI based, it allows you to install all the components you need at first with the GUI installed. What one can do after installation is open up the installer again, and uncheck the GUI option.

This ensures that you are not in trouble as far as processing overheads go, and now have access to a clean and light installation of Server 2012.

Future-Ready Networking

Network virtualisation has gone through major reform in Server 2012. One of the biggest issues that Microsoft users faced over the last few Windows Server releases were the problematic aspects of virtual machine management and provisioning. Dealing with the rules and limitations of IP address management was another issue, which Microsoft has resolved in this new release. This helps ease the adoption of private cloud while removing barriers for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) adoption.

IP Address Management

Over the years, growth in the IT organisation has led to using Excel sheets equally in efficient and inefficient ways – to store user IP addresses. However, you would be very happy to know that this is not the way forward. Microsoft has made improvements in their IP Address Management (IPAM) techniques. IPAM is a new feature in Windows Server 2012 that provides a new internal framework for locating and managing IP address spaces on networks. You can also manage and monitor servers running Domain Name Service (DNS) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). You can also make use of features like automatic IP discovery and provides a host of other IP-related tasks focused on management, monitoring, and auditing.

SMB 3.0

Do we need to say anymore?

Well, fact of the matter is that users were good enough using NFS especially in face of keeping with virtualisation and scale. Many even wondered why Microsoft wasted their efforts putting in place SMB. But if you zoom forward to today, Hyper-V 3 and SMB 3.0 make deploying virtual environments and managing them a breeze for administrators. Yes – CIOs can rejoice. You now have a better integrated virtual machine solution both in terms of space, speed and agility. According to Bhunwar, SMB is one of those definitive features that will change the way VMs and server environments are deployed and managed in the future.

While Microsoft has added in a fairly large number of features into Server 2012, it is these that lay the foundation of most of these features. With new ways of handling de-duplication, virtual environments and network optimisation, Microsoft is set to define how easy it has become to extend enterprise architecture to private, public and hybrid clouds.