Microsoft opens the kimono a little on its upcoming server operating system.
The Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas was the backdrop for a rather unsurprising bit of news: Windows Server “8” will officially be named Windows Server 2012 and will be released this calendar year.
The news came as part of the rollout for System Center 2012, the latest edition of the company’s system management environment. Corporate Vice President Brad Anderson channeled the spirit of Steve Jobs and called Server 2012 “the most amazing release of Windows Server that we’ve ever done.”
Anderson and Jeff Woolsey, principal program manager lead for Windows Server virtualization, showed off features like storage pooling and the improved functionality in the Hyper-V virtual machine hypervisor. During the keynote, Woolsey added 270GB to his storage pool while the server was up and running live and no reboot was required.
Hyper-V for Server 2012 will support up to a full terabyte of memory per virtual machine, up to 64 terabytes of virtual storage per virtual disk, and up to 64 nodes and 4,000 virtual machines in a cluster.
For those of you keeping score, VMware’s VSphere supports up to 1TB of memory, 32 virtual CPUs, and up to 2TB of virtual storage, minus 512 bytes.
Live migration in Windows Server 2012 has been enhanced to support live migration of a virtual machine between two servers or between two separate clusters using nothing but an Ethernet cable.
Windows Server 2012 also addresses problems with network multitenancy, where multiple clouds, groups and companies share the same fabric but need to be isolated on the fabric. Network virtualization in Windows Server 2012 allows subnets to be shared using the same IP address range, but all on the same fabric, Woolsey said.
Your move, VMware.
