An Overview of Windows Server 2012 New Features

Basics of Windows Server 2012

Windows Server 2012 (codenamed 'Windows Server 8') is the sixth release of Windows Server by Microsoft. Server 2012 is the successor of Windows Server 2012 R2 and the server version Windows 8. It introduced with many new features and with some improved features. We are going to discuss about the windows server 2012 and its new features.

Windows Server 2012 Versions

Windows Server has Four editions are Foundation, Essentials, Standard and Datacenter.

• Windows Server 2012 Foundation: Foundation version was designed for the economical general purpose. Max 15 Users use it at the same time on the server.
• Windows Server 2012 Essentials: This version was designed for the small business environments with simple interface and no virtualization rights.
• Windows Server 2012 Standard: Standard version was introduced for low density and non-virtualized environments.
• Windows Server 2012 Datacenter: Datacenter version was designed for highly virtualized private and hybrid cloud environments with unlimited virtual instances.

Windows Server 2012 Features and Roles

Hyper-V Virtualization: Virtualization get some updates such as Hyper-V Replicas which enables to replicate virtual machines between storage systems, clusters and data systems. Storage Migration also introduced with it where we can move our virtual hard disks to a different physical storage.

Data Deduplication: Data Deduplication allows users to save the disk space by storing a single copy of identical data on the volume. The main purpose of this feature is to increase the storage efficiency of disks.

Domain Controller Cloning: In Windows Server 2012 we can easily organize the additional domain controllers by cloning the existing with Active Directory Domain Services.

Server Core: This one is one of the great features of Windows server 2012, it gives the ability to switch between a server core and GUI install any reinstallation of OS.

Issues with Windows Server 2012

Windows Server 2012 users have some good and bad experience. Users are facing problems such as network problem due to this problem users get a very low performance network and it takes a lot of time to write files over SMB (Server Message Block) network. Users also have a bad experience while installing Windows updates, get reboot several times. These are the issues occurs the data loss problem. If data have been lost due to connection, power failure or hard disk failure, User can get their data from their backup. In case there is no backup then user can try Windows Server 2012 File Recovery Software.