Windows Server 2012 RC is out... thoughts?

MrGuvernment

MrGuvernment

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tons of threads on win 8, but i want to hear form the Server users their thoughts on Server 2012?

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/windows-server/2012-default.aspx

I have used the 8 beta myself at home for a few weeks now and i am finding it very clumbsy.

it seem that simple tasks before are now burried deep in menu options.

i really want to give it a try and experience it, but i am finding it somewhat difficult..

Some of the new storage features look nice... but how well will they work?

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/windows-server/2012-storage-availability.aspx
 
I'm definitely interested in it for the storage features
may choose it over OI/ZFS
haven't gotten around to building my server yet though so no testing
 
i found just managing a domain seemed like allot more steps to get to areas that before were so simple, but i will say i dont know my way around very well yet
 
I plan on putting in a new environment soon that will have 7-10 servers (some virtualized) but I am going to stick with 2008 R2. There seem to be some nice virtualization features of 8, but nothing I need/care about, and the storage improvements that I've seen are nothing I would use.

The one part about Server 8 that I dream could be put into 2008 is the integrated cloud storage.
MrGuvernment said:
i found just managing a domain seemed like allot more steps to get to areas that before were so simple, but i will say i dont know my way around very well yet
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I think Microsoft really wants to push the Administration Center, and eventually replace ADU&C.
 
Yeah; Microsoft has been pushing Admin Center for a while now. It's probably a better tool, but I still like my ADU&C! Did they change Admin Center at all in this version? Haven't had a chance to play with it on a domain yet...
 
Demon10000 said:
Yeah; Microsoft has been pushing Admin Center for a while now. It's probably a better tool, but I still like my ADU&C! Did they change Admin Center at all in this version? Haven't had a chance to play with it on a domain yet...
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It's supposed to be improved but I have not tried it. (like I said, most of the Srv8 features do not intrigue me).
 
I think they want people to use the RSAT tools on a client more than anything.
 
seems like they want people to go to powershell and back to the CLI days :D

i am all for trying new things, why i havent given up on 2012 yet.
 
MrGuvernment said:
seems like they want people to go to powershell and back to the CLI days :D

i am all for trying new things, why i havent given up on 2012 yet.
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Its what they been talking about but then why did they fucking stick metro in it?
 
If you're using the metro interface, you're probably doing something wrong.

Hyper-V's new features are pretty nice, esp from a small business perspective, lots of must have HA or near HA features rolled in. Waiting for RTM to test on DCs and file servers and such but looking forward to a few features there like data dedup and the DC being VM rollback aware, boy was that a pain when I accidentally did that on 08r2 >_>

I also like being able to switch between core and GUI mode with just a reboot, should save quite a bit of memory in my labs since you can install things that normally require a GUI to install, remove the GUI, then reinstall it if you need to locally admin them.

Overall I'm looking forward to the RTM, despite the metro interface, since it can mostly be avoided with server manager and remote management.

Metro on Win8 on the other hand...
 
Yeah there is some nice things. Clustering is not feature I care about since most of my deployments don't use it. I am looking forward to RODC new features, DFS, and improvements, and GPO, as far as HyperV crap couldn't care less Vmware is still better by a long shot. I have had terrible results running Hypershit, Until MS makes a bare metal hypervisor that will run on a USB stick I will not even consider their giant bag of shit that they call visualization.
 
I'll continue to use Hyper-Awesome on my server with 64GB RAM instead of shelling out hundreds to VMShit for the privilege (I can append random adjectives to names too).

Fact is with the new Hyper-V VMware ISN'T better by a long shot any more, HV caught up or surpassed VMW in guest RAM and CPU cores, max host cores, max host vCPUs, and host RAM. The free Hyper-V Server 2012 will support the same "no shared storage required" live migrations and replication as the WS2012 RC version does. MS already has the new HV drivers in the latest Linux kernels so Linux compatibility issues are a thing of the past.

You might want to read this comparison before jumping on the "Hyper-V is shit because it used to be shit, oh and it's made by M$" bandwagon. Your only real valid complaint about it is you can't run it off a USB stick but if a USB stick is more important to you than same/higher limits and "shared-nothing" live migrations and replication for a free product vs a very expensive product, then ok guy.
 
From our brief trials at work technically it is an extremely competent OS, with worth additions to 2008R2. Looks/usability are a big step back on account of the "Everything wants to be a tablet!" shit MS marketing has going on right now.

My guess is we are going to make use of it a fair bit at work, unlike 8, which the users are very much not interested in on account of the UI.
 
-Dragon- said:
MS already has the new HV drivers in the latest Linux kernels so Linux compatibility issues are a thing of the past.
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In my opinion, that's the wrong way to go about it. The virtualized OS should have no idea that it's not running on bare metal. It shouldn't NEED an additional driver. My Hyper-V VMs in the past have always known that they were sitting inside Hyper-V, because Hyper-V gave them emulated hardware instead of passing through the good stuff. Looking at Device Manager, for example, would show the hardware as being manufactured by Microsoft. Honestly, it worked great for 95% of what I did. That other 5%, though, was a major pain in the ass. Anything dealing with graphics just plain didn't work, or didn't work right.

I've not had a chance to play with 2012's Hyper-V yet. Do they still emulate hardware in the manner mentioned above?
 
Umm, I think every VM host has some sort of guest additions/drivers for their guests to be optimally supported. Most guests CAN work ok without them but if you want all the features of the host then you need the extensions to properly support things like direct IO, SR-IOV, etc... Additionally you can't have features like dynamic memory or host initated shut downs without some way for the guest and host to talk to each other. Additionally there's no such thing as "generic network driver", so you still need SOME sort of driver to access the virtual hardware. I suppose they COULD chose to emulate some old, well known common device, but what happens when new things come out that the host wants to pass through to the OS that the old hardware doesn't support? As far as passing things through raw, you can only pass through hardware to a single VM, you can't give every single VM passthrough access to the one SATA controller, and you don't want to have a seperate NIC for every single VM in your host. Sure if you use SR-IOV you can passthrough a VF to each guest but guess what, the guests need to know how to use it, and that requires a driver.

So I guess the answer to your question is, yes, they do still, fortunately, need the right virtual drivers.

So while in your opinion they shouldn't be needed, the facts of Hyper-V Integration Services, VMware Tools, Virtual Box Guest Extensions, Xen PV Drivers, KVM GuestDrivers, etc... would all seem to disagree with you.
 
-Dragon- said:
I'll continue to use Hyper-Awesome on my server with 64GB RAM instead of shelling out hundreds to VMShit for the privilege (I can append random adjectives to names too).

Fact is with the new Hyper-V VMware ISN'T better by a long shot any more, HV caught up or surpassed VMW in guest RAM and CPU cores, max host cores, max host vCPUs, and host RAM. The free Hyper-V Server 2012 will support the same "no shared storage required" live migrations and replication as the WS2012 RC version does. MS already has the new HV drivers in the latest Linux kernels so Linux compatibility issues are a thing of the past.

You might want to read this comparison before jumping on the "Hyper-V is shit because it used to be shit, oh and it's made by M$" bandwagon. Your only real valid complaint about it is you can't run it off a USB stick but if a USB stick is more important to you than same/higher limits and "shared-nothing" live migrations and replication for a free product vs a very expensive product, then ok guy.
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Sorry but 2012 Hyperv is still not a production release as VM5.0 is. I still prefer the small footprint VM provides then the house of Cards Windows OS is. I can also provision VM through network heck I don't even need to install it locally. Can you do that in Windows? Oh yeah I forgot the amount of stupid patches windows needs for security reasons. Updating a hyper V host is still a painful process.
MS shit ain't cheap either. Every time you need a Hypervisor upgrade you need to shell out a lot of cash for a new OS. Then Something as SCVMMwill cost you tons more cash. So before you preach about a non market player ie non RTM you might want to compare what is and what isn't.

I also like my sub 10 minutes to a vm host deployment.
 
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Hyepr-V Server is free, always has been, 2012 won't be any different. But it's pretty obvious you're one of those "HV is bad because M$ is bad" kind of guys and won't even give it an objective look. Personally I could care less about install time stuff because that's all of 0.01% of the overall usage of a system.

People who ARE capable of looking at the new features objectively would probably find HV2012 to be quite a good option vs esxi5. Heck for a home lab with 64GB HV2012 is downright amazing, cause lets face it 64GB isn't really that much any more especially with some of these socket 2011 boards. For what a license to use the full 64GB would cost me for esxi, I could buy another 64GB RAM for my box.

And I really can't believe you're bringing up cost of things like SCVMM when VMware is even more outrageously priced.
 
I never said MS is bad. If you haven't bother looking at my sig.

Your now just talking about small home labs fine production its a different story.

Actually with the Bare essentials you get Vcenter.
Most labs and home labs will never even go passed a single Host.

I don't honestly care what hv2012 has. Its not out, I will not trust a beta host myself. Plus I got VMWare NFR so to me its a moot point.
 
I never said put the beta into production, I just said check it out. MS put a lot of effort into turning HV2012 into a production worthy product. Even if you don't throw it on a box to test out at least read about the improvements they've made. They pretty much closed the gap with VM in all areas and surpased them in quite a few, which is great because there frankly hasn't been a REAL competitor in the virtualization world for the last few years. Why do you think they had that huge price hike a while back? What else were you going to use? HV2008r2? LOL! But with HV2012 people will actually have a choice, and with HV2012 being free for the "bare metal" equivalent version, VM is going to have a hard time keeping prices high.
 
-Dragon- said:
But it's pretty obvious you're one of those "HV is bad because M$ is bad" kind of guys and won't even give it an objective look. .....
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Do you work for Microsoft? You apparently poo-poo on anyone who wants to really put HV to the test, but it's obvious from your posts that your extent of running a virtual environment seems rather small, as in maybe a couple of servers hosting perhaps a dozen or more vm's.

The environment I manage has around 50 hosts running almost 400 vm's, and yes, it's using vmware enterprise plus.

One legitimate complaint already mentioned, what's the 2012 footprint like? I can install esxi on a sd card using less than 1GB just to boot up the host and access the storage on our san and I don't have to worry about continuously patching the stupid o/s every couple months like I do with a Microsoft o/s.

I noticed the article that was linked earlier was pretty much a sales sheet comparing HV 2012 to enterprise plus. When I got down to the live migration area and it correctly mentioned that enterprise plus has a limit of 8 simultaneous migrations occuring over a 10G connection, yet HV 2012 is unlimited. Ha....ok, I would just LOVE to see Microsoft's product handle a migration of, say, 20 VMs simultaneously. And oh let's also not forget that they state they can migrate not only between hosts but also between luns that aren't shared, so let's throw that into the test equation too by assuming one entire cluster just bit the bullet. So now not only does HV2012 have to migrate the 20 VMs to new hosts but it also has to move them to new luns.

Sales brochures like that are easy to post on the internet and say "look at the comparison charts - VMware just can't keep up". I'm not saying HV2012 can't do these things; what I am saying is I'll believe it when I see it.
 
Bingo. VMWare doesn't make their money on SMBs with 4 servers they make it from companies with dozens/hundreds/thousands of VMs and hyper-v doesn't have a hope of breaking into that market until they prove it does everything VMWare does in production and then some. Virtualization of a computer isn't a big deal anymore, being able to support large amounts of hardware isn't a big deal anymore, being able to do live migrations isn't a big deal anymore. The reason being they all do these things to some extent. The reason people use VMWare is because they do all those things better than hyper-v (in production) and they also offer the most robust tools for administration of your cloud environments. I'm not against hyper-v since it's included in the cost of the OS (still doesn't make it free) but don't come in here preaching how VMWare is done for because of some spec sheet on a beta product.

Now, can someone that is actually previewing server 2012 comment? I haven't had a chance to get into yet and would like to hear some people's thoughts.
 
Wrench00 said:
Sorry but 2012 Hyperv is still not a production release as VM5.0 is. I still prefer the small footprint VM provides then the house of Cards Windows OS is. I can also provision VM through network heck I don't even need to install it locally. Can you do that in Windows? Oh yeah I forgot the amount of stupid patches windows needs for security reasons. Updating a hyper V host is still a painful process.
MS shit ain't cheap either. Every time you need a Hypervisor upgrade you need to shell out a lot of cash for a new OS. Then Something as SCVMMwill cost you tons more cash. So before you preach about a non market player ie non RTM you might want to compare what is and what isn't.

I also like my sub 10 minutes to a vm host deployment.
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Ever heard of the bare metal Hyper V server? It's free. It's basically a server core install with the hyper v role installed.
 
The VMware fanboys are in full effect here..Jeez. HV2012 looks pretty fucking good at this point. You guys should actually test it out instead of blindly dismissing it. I agree with dragon here, this is a pretty substantial release. VMware is still gonna be the hypervisor of choice for many but this is a step in the right direction to be sure. I want to know how the shared nothing live migration will work out, I'm a little skeptical to be honest.
 
Wrench00 said:
I never said MS is bad. If you haven't bother looking at my sig.

Your now just talking about small home labs fine production its a different story.

Actually with the Bare essentials you get Vcenter.
Most labs and home labs will never even go passed a single Host.

I don't honestly care what hv2012 has. Its not out, I will not trust a beta host myself. Plus I got VMWare NFR so to me its a moot point.
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It's not beta, it's RC already. Also, MS said a couple weeks ago that it has moved all servers used to run Bing to server 2012. I'm guessing that is a larger scale production enviroment than most of us will ever work on...
 
Finally took sometime to read over some of the features introduced with 2012 and had some thoughts and wanted to get others input.

ReFS - Sounds very cool. NTFS is awesome don't get me wrong but the idea behind ReFS makes a lot of sense to me. Provide a file system specifically for file storage that isn't designed for regular system access but around data quality/reliability for bulk storage systems. I'm still trying to wrap my head around how this affects databases. The organization of pages is so integral to SQL Server for example that the by nature constant shuffle of metadata in ReFS seems like it won't lend itself to SQL storage. Can't wait to test it though.

IPAM - A million times yes. While I don't feel it goes far enough (authoritative DHCP still doesn't sound like it's available) it's a great start to have a central management/reporting of IP addressing within your domain. I'm hoping they extend this further but a good start.

Storage Spaces - Can someone please explain to me how this is not an advanced software RAID? Yes I know this will be available in W8 as well but hadn't really read about it until reading about ReFS. I've read three different articles about storage spaces and it all sounds like a highly flexible software RAID. I think sounds good but still wrapping my head around why I would use this in large scale deployments (large servers or servers with available shared storage).

AD Improvements - Just some of the highlights I saw were a better recycle bin, easier federation services, some streamlined management items, etc. I didn't see anything massive but more just refinements.

Expanded Powershell - Um, yes is about all I have to say. Looks like they're really extending it and while I've only done a few scripts and other items with powershell I'm a huge fan.

Overall I just see more refinements and polishing designed to ease the burden of the system admin. I'm glad they're improving Hyper-V and am glad they're taking that seriously so we have competition in that market. I still don't see a huge shift coming that makes over VMWare's market share but more options are a good thing. The server OS looks to be more streamlined and overall good improvements while looking towards the future.
 
I don't think storage spaces was intended for enterprise use as much as small to medium size business that don't have a large SAN backend. Same with HV features like replica and non-shared live migrations, amazing for small IT shops without the budget for a SAN, pretty much useless for mega datacenter deployment.

There's a few other quality of life additions that I never hear anybody mention. they did a lot of work on network file transfers to help make them as fast as possible, such as remote copies or moves from one file share to another on the same server now copy locally on the remote system instead of over the network to the initiating machine then back to the same machine, copies and moves to a different volume happen at local drive speed, moves to the same volume happen instantly. When copying files across the network the copy process seems to be threaded now and can utilize multiple network connections, I've seen single file transfers at 1.7-1.8Gbit spread across two different NICs. One odd thing is teamed adapters don't seem to be able to take advantage of this and get full team speed so in some ways it's better to just have a bunch of single links instead of actually using the new team feature.

Another thing is the memory footprint of WS2012 vs 2008r2 is tiny. I upgraded my NPS/RADIUS server to WS2012, did a full GUI install and configuration, then removed the GUI features, and where the 2008r2 box was around 500MB, the WS2012 will shrink itself down to 250-280MB for the same functionality.
 
wixter said:
The environment I manage has around 50 hosts running almost 400 vm's, and yes, it's using vmware enterprise plus.

One legitimate complaint already mentioned, what's the 2012 footprint like? I can install esxi on a sd card using less than 1GB just to boot up the host and access the storage on our san and I don't have to worry about continuously patching the stupid o/s every couple months like I do with a Microsoft o/s.
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If you aren't patching your ESXi hosts every couple months then your environment isn't secure. There have been 4 security patches at least so far this year...just saying. It's not every month but lately it has been.
 
I have a few years experience with VMware and I have managed production environments with 15 hosts and 60 VM's however I haven't really messed around with Hyper-V any as of yet. Seeing as how I just got a TechNET subscription I might just deploy a nested Hyper-V host on my VMware lab.
 
So, this is live now... any new thoughts?

i am reading through every new feature now, and working to get a technet at work so i can start testing things out live and see how it goes..


What reason would someone want to go to 2012 over 2008 R2?
 
MrGuvernment said:
What reason would someone want to go to 2012 over 2008 R2?
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Lots of new things in 2012 that would make people want to use it. You've read the new features, so you should have an idea.

Biggest reason I'm building my new machines with 2012: I don't want to worry about upgrading them later....
 
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