If you’re not following TechEd 2013, you’re missing some pretty big announcements from Microsoft.  This week, Microsoft announced major updates across many of its product lines.  While the coming updates may not hold the major significance that the Windows 8/Windows Server 2012 product wave enjoyed, it’s obvious that Microsoft is working toward a goal with the product line.  In this Wikibon professional alert, I described what I see as Microsoft’s solidification of its future potential as a major player.

Beyond the cloud and virtualization elements that I described in the Wikibon professional alert, Microsoft made a number of other big product announcements this week. In this article, I will discuss Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2.

Windows Server 2012 R2

When Windows Server 2012 hit the market last year, Microsoft made a big splash with a dizzying array of new functionality, including substantial new hypervisor functionality that all but closed the gap between Microsoft and VMware, major storage improvement and a whole lot more.  With the R2 release of Windows Server 2012, Microsoft appears to be intent on continuing the feature momentum established with the prior release.  To that end, here are some of the features that Microsoft has announced as a part of R2.

Hyper-V updates

Microsoft is continuing to push Hyper-V ever forward and is, thankfully, finally doing so at a faster pace than in the past.  Among the biggest new features in Hyper-V are memory compressed Live Migration, which improves the performance of the migration operation.  In addition to a number of other VHDX improvements, Microsoft has added support for shared VHDX files between guests, which can enable services insides guests to be more easily clustered.  Microsoft has also improved the Hyper-V Replica service by providing more fine grained controls as well as an Azure-based Recover Manager.

There are many other enhancements coming in Hyper-V 2012 R2. I’ll outline those in separate articles in the coming weeks.

Storage improvements

Microsoft truly attacked storage in Windows Server 2012.  With the upcoming R2 release, Microsoft is continuing the onslaught by providing a number of new and major enhancements.  On the minor front, Microsoft’s iSCSI target software now uses the VHDX file format, which allows administrators to create accessible LUNS of up to 64 TB in size.  Even more importantly, Microsoft seems to be helping organizations embrace Bring Your Own Device initiatives through the implementation of Work Folders.  This feature will allow users to enroll their devices and synchronize files.  In the event that a device is unenrolled, the work files will be removed, leaving personal items intact.

Tiered Storage Spaces

Storage Spaces was added in Windows Server 2012 as a way to leverage different kinds of storage as a cohesive whole. In Windows Server 2012 R2, Microsoft has added auto-tiering capability that will leverage SSDs.  Storage Spaces automatically moves data between SSDs and HDDs and also provides the ability to pin selected files on the ultrafast SSD tier.

VHDX enhancements

First introduced in Server 2012, the new virtual disk (VHDX) format is undergoing some improvements in the R2 release.  It’s now resizable on the fly, meaning that administrators can expand and shrink volumes while they’re active, meaning less downtime for routine needs.  Microsoft has also added deduplication support for VHDX files.

Other enhancements

With such features as site-to-site VPN gateway, three-way mirrors in Storage Spaces, IP Address Management (IPAM) inside virtual environments, and more, Microsoft is bringing major new functionality to Windows Server 2012.

System Center 2012 R2

First, as was not the case with the original RTM, System Center 2012 R2 will be released alongside Windows Server 2012 R2 so there is no functionality/management gap this time around.  System Center is a beast of a product, so I’m only focusing on big themes here, but Microsoft is continuing their “people-centric” vision of IT whereby the services consumed by users should be easy to use and easily accessible while also being relatively easy to manage by IT.

With System Center 2012 R2, Microsoft is also strengthening its “software-defined networking solution by enabling provisioning of multitenant edge gateways to bridge physical and virtual datacenters – this will enable flexible workload mobility in hybrid cloud computing models.”  SC 2012 R2 includes the capability to provision Windows Azure-based virtual machines, too, further cementing Microsoft’s desire to support both public and private clouds in a seamless way.

As such, scalability is a big part of the new wave of Microsoft products.  For example, VMM 2012 R2 can support up to 1,000 hosts and 25,000 virtual machines in a single instance.  On the monitoring front, Operations Manager now support monitoring of both local and cloud-based environments.  With the addition of the Veeam Management Pack, Operations Manager can also deeply monitor vSphere environments.

Summary

These are just two of the products that Microsoft announced this week.  In addition, Microsoft made announcements on the big data front with SQL Server 2014 and Visual Studio 2013, topics I will address soon.