Earlier today, Mike Neil announced the availability of Technical Preview 5 for Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016. This is an exciting moment, and it coincides with our final installment of the video series, “Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016.” In today’s video, I talk about Nano Server and what the future of server computing looks like in a cloud-first world.

Looking back, the history of Windows Server has had four distinct eras:

• Server for the masses: A world-class kernel combined with the desktop GUI experience and the economies of high volume hardware transformed the world by empowering everyone to buy, deploy, and operate their own servers. This produced so many servers and desktop machines that it brought about the next era.
• Enterprise servers: Active Directory, Group Policy, and Remote Desktop Services enabled customers to connect, manage, and transform large sets of servers and desktops into a coherent enterprise. The introduction of .NET brought about the LOB application revolution where companies’ own developers were able to create and deliver mission critical applications. This created so many new servers that it brought about the next era.
• Datacenter servers: Architectural improvements to scale up/scale out servers and improve storage and networking, combined with server virtualization and PowerShell, made it possible for customers to run every possible workload and to create large and highly cost-efficient datacenters. This enabled the Azure public cloud which brought us to our current era.
• Cloud servers: Cloud-inspired, software-defined networking, storage, and compute along with Nano Server, advancements in PowerShell and DSC, and improved Linux support enable customers to develop, deploy, and operate fabrics, applications, and services with cloud scale, elasticity, performance, and resiliency.

Windows Server 2016 improves the experience of all customers, not just those moving to the cloud model. For example, a small business that wants to have a single server with a local keyboard, monitor, and mouse will love the rich Windows 10 client experience that the Server with a desktop experience deployment option delivers. The substantial innovations to Active Directory, .NET, virtualization, RDS, security, automation, and remote management make Windows Server 2016 a great release for customers using it as an Enterprise Server or Datacenter Server as well.

Nano Server is a great example of the innovation customers need in a cloud-era operating system. It is a new deployment option for Windows Server 2016, where you start by loading a very small image that is 25x smaller than a full image with Window Server with desktop experience. Then, you add only the roles you need – this is the “just enough OS” model. As a result, boot time is crazy fast and it is simpler to operate when you only support the roles you need. To gain the efficiency and agility of cloud, IT managers can use PowerShell V5 and Desired State Configuration for powerful remote management and automation. We also offer a remote GUI, the new web-based server management tools.

In this first release, the Nano Server deployment is focused on two scenarios:

1. As the host for compute and/or storage clusters
2. As a lightweight OS in a VM or container for “born in the cloud” applications. (See Age of Ascent example using Nano Server, ASPNET, and Service Fabric.)

I believe that the shift to the cloud era is the most revolutionary change our industry has ever seen. Changes like this provide great opportunities for people that spend the effort to keep up with the technology and invest in their skills. I strongly encourage you to watch my recent talk on this topic called Thriving through the Transition.

After watching that talk, you’ll understand why it is so important for you to download Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 5 and give Nano Server a try. Check out our Getting Started guide and follow us on the Nano Server blog.

Finally, make sure to visit our new Windows Server channel on Channel 9 where you can find videos for all Ten Reasons You’ll Love Windows Server 2016. If you’d like regular updates, follow me on Twitter @jsnover.

In his “Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016” video series, technical evangelist Matt McSpirit introduces you to some of the experts behind the most exciting new features in Windows Server 2016.

Get more updates on Windows Server 2016 by following the Windows Server team @WindowsServer and Matt @mattmcspirit on Twitter.

Check out the previous posts in this series:

• Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016 #1: PowerShell and DSC
• Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016 #2: Active Directory and Identity
• Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016 #3: Server Management Tools
• Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016 #4: Remote Desktop Services
• Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016 #5: Software-defined Storage
• Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016 #6: Software-defined Compute
• Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016 #7: Software-defined Networking
• Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016 #8: Security
• Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016 #9: Containers

The post Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016 #10: Nano Server appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

SPA 3.0 helps IT administrators collect metrics to diagnose performance issues on Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Windows Server 2008 for up to 100 servers unobtrusively without adding software agents or reconfiguring production servers.  It generates comprehensive performance reports as shown in figure 1 below and historical charts with recommendations. 

Introduction

In this post we discuss how SPA works and some of the unique features available at your fingertips once you download the tool. 

Figure 1:  A snapshot of a SPA performance report with two warnings

At a high level, SPA is composed of two parts.  The first is a management console or dashboard for the user to pick which servers they plan to collect data on, the corresponding role of the server, how long they need to collect data for, and how often collections happen.  The console has a set of requirements listed on the download page. 

The second part of SPA is the Advisor Packs or “APs”.  APs contain a set of performance rules.  An AP serves two purposes; first it defines what data gets collected from the server when that AP is instantiated.  Second, the AP rules are used for assessing the server’s behavior.  For example if data from a server shows more than 10% packet retransmit rate for any network adapter and that network adapter has a lot of send activity on it per system counters, then a warning is logged in a report.

How it Works

Now let’s step back and give you a visual representation of the end to end process so you have a better understanding for the role each SPA component plays and how they interact with each another.  The different steps in the flow are numbered 1 through 6 with each step described in greater detail below.

Figure 2:  SPA workflow collecting data from remote servers

1.       Setting up the data collection sessions

The user installed SPA and chooses which APs they want depending on the target server role.  SPA ships with some built in APs like the Core OS AP, IIS AP, and the Hyper-V host AP.  The Core OS AP is a generic AP covering the fundamentals like I/O and resource utilization, while the other 2 are role specific.  The APs are imported into SPA to help define what data is collected and later used to assess the servers’ performance and generate the report.  Users can choose and run multiple APs in a single data collection session.

2.       Starting data collection on the target servers

The user defines how long they want to collect data for and chooses if they want a onetime collection or if they want to collect data at regular intervals.  Keep in mind that the longer the collection the more data there will be to process and send back to the console machine.  The console then sends a data collection request to the target servers over the Performance Logs and Alerts (PLA) service used by tools like Perfmon and SPA starts collecting the data.

3.       Data collection on servers

Each target server receives a request from the console machine to start collecting a predefined set of data.  SPA collects data from Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) events, Windows Management Infrastructure (WMI), performance counters, configuration files, and registry keys. 

4.       Saving the data for post processing

Each server writes the performance data to a pre-defined file share.  We expect administrators to specify a file share on the console and avoid disk impact on the target server, but they can also choose where to create the file share from within SPA’s menu options.

5.       Storing the data for generating a report

When the console pulls the data from the file share, it stores it in a SQL database.  Because the data is stored in a database, SPA provides historical charts that help with trending performance behaviors over a period of days or hours.  Users can also delete older reports from the database. 

6.       Generating the Performance report

SPA analyzes results based on the AP rules.  It summarizes the findings in a report, identifies issues with some possible mitigation and lets the administrator decide if they want to make changes. NOTE: There is an expectation that this tool is used by experienced administrators that understand the intent of an implementation and are knowledgeable enough to determine whether a suggested mitigation is appropriate for the target system.

SPA Features

Now that you have an idea of how the process works end-to-end, let’s shift our focus to what users should come to expect from using SPA 3.0 in terms of installation, data collection, and report viewing.    

• Zero agent installation on the server  To use SPA, you just need to install it on a console machine meeting the requirements.  SPA can collect performance data locally or from remote servers.  Because SPA uses PLA for remote data collection, a user can point SPA at a remote server and start collecting performance data immediately (while the workload is running).  A user can also have data collections on multiple servers going in parallel.  Of course, the console machine needs to have the right authentication and ports open to ensure success.  NOTE: The collection overhead is typically minimal with no impact to most workloads.  The exceptions are extreme low latency workloads where the collection can alter a workload’s behavior.
• Extensible scriptable APs  The APs is where all the performance knowledge is embodied and captured.  The APs define what data is captured and what gets used to assess the server’s performance.  Because it’s written in T-SQL, composing an AP is simple. We encourage you to check out the AP development guide to help you write a custom AP to help you expedite diagnosing performance issues. 
• Multiple data sources for a cohesive view of system performance  Windows has a very rich set of instrumentation points and APs can take advantage of this.  The built-in APs certainly do!  SPA collects data from a number of different sources mentioned previously, which makes it a very powerful tool.  It correlates all of this data together, draws causality between the data points, and presents the user with a rolled up view of how their system is behaving with actionable recommendations addressing any reported issues.  The user can then act on the recommendations which provide good insight into some key performance metrics like latency, scalability, and throughput.
• Side by side comparison of performance and server configuration data  This new feature in SPA 3.0 allows users to compare data collected at two different points in time for the same server, collected at two different points in time for different servers, or collected for two different servers at the same time.  The ability to compare how the server was behaving before a certain date or before applying a certain patch is very useful in narrowing down the point in time at which a change happened and correlating that with a drop in performance.   The report uses triangles with a yellow exclamation mark to represent warnings and uses check marks inside of green circles to indicate no action is necessary. 

Figure 3:  Side by side comparison report for the same machine at 2 different points in time

• Charting and historical trending  Charting the performance characteristics and metrics of a server over a specified period of time helps users recognize patterns and anomalies associated with specific days of the week where a certain activity takes place.  For example, an administrator may have a scheduled indexing task kicking in and impacting system performance.  In this case it can increase disk latency because of the incurred disk I/O writes from the indexing service kicking in and spinning the media.  The following figures show some of the cool capabilities built-in SPA 3.0 for charting and trending data.

Figure 4:  Historic trending chart showing performance metrics over time

Figure 5:  Trend for the minimum file write throughput achieved over a period of 7 days

• Built-in APs for key server roles like Hyper-V and IIS To help users get started with using SPA 3.0, we provide three built-in APs as part of the download package.  The first is the Core OS AP that focuses on basic resource characteristics like CPU utilization, network traffic, memory consumption, and storage related events.  The IIS AP which has Web server specific rules like the top 10 URLs accessed and some of the common configuration parameters in IIS.  The third is the Hyper-V host AP that focuses on a server hosting multiple virtual machines and provides virtualization specific diagnostics for performance issues. 
• Configurable sampling intervals and durations for collecting data  Some users want the ability to collect data on demand, while others would like to have a predefined collection interval.  The latter can be helpful if you are trying to isolate a performance behavior that doesn’t happen on a regular basis and are trying to catch it by setting up frequent data collection intervals for a specified period of time.  There are also users who want to manually kick off a data collection especially if they just downloaded an update or a patch, or they just did a hardware or firmware upgrade in their environment and want to quantify the performance impact before and after using the side by side comparison view
• PowerShell scripts support  System administrator can write scripts to invoke SPA cmdlets and schedule remote periodic data collections on target servers within certain time intervals.  They can also query the database for information about which APs were run and the target servers with associated SPA reports.  The SPA manual has more details and syntax for the supported PowerShell cmdlets. 
• Configurable thresholds inside of APs The built-in APs ship with a predefined set of thresholds for all the rules, but given that different workloads and different customers will have different Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and different alarm points, users have the flexibility to set their own thresholds in the APs to better suite their environment and workload.

Figure 6:  Users can get more information about a rule in the Details view

Conclusion

In this blog we introduced the redesigned Server Performance Advisor 3.0.  We walked you through a high level overview of how the different SPA components interact and what role they each play.  We also shared some of the exciting new features and capabilities available with SPA.  We hope you enjoyed this post and we invite you to download and try out the latest bits from the SPA MSDN download page.  Please share your experiences and send us feedback at spafb@microsoft.com. 

The post Server Performance Advisor (SPA) 3.0 appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

In a world where management has shifted from managing one server to managing many complex, heterogeneous servers and clouds, standards-based management—long supported by Microsoft—has become essential. We were one of the founding members of the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), and shipped the first, and richest, Common Information Model Object Manager (CIMOM) we know as Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). In 2005, Microsoft, along with 12 other companies, submitted WS-Management for DMTF standardization. Since then, the specification has been improved, stabilized and implemented widely by the industry. Today, the specification reached its highest level of maturity as it became an ISO (International Organization for Standardization)/IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) international standard. Windows Remote Management (WinRM), Microsoft’s implementation of WS-Management, has been included with Windows since Windows XP. Today, all versions of Windows, both client and server from XP forward, support WS-Management through WinRM. System Center uses WS-Management to remotely manage systems. This includes both Windows and Linux (System Center Cross Platform). Windows PowerShell uses WS-Management for remote shell access.

In Windows Server 2012, standards-based management was necessary to help make Windows Server 2012 the best Cloud OS. WS-Management provided remoting access for managing Windows resources by using CIM + WS-Management. While WMI has served our customers and partners well, the true promise of standards-based management was only realized through completing and making our WS-Management implementation, WinRM, the default remote management protocol for Windows. In Windows today, Windows PowerShell remoting is built on WS-Management. Additionally, WMI’s default protocol is no longer DCOM, but WinRM.

WS-Management as a management protocol

WS-MAN was developed to enable remote management of systems over a firewall friendly protocol such as HTTP while utilizing existing tools and investments in SOAP.  With the 1.0 and 1.1 releases, WS-MAN has been used as the preferred protocol for desktop and mobile system management as part of the DASH initiative and a recommended protocol for server systems management as part of the SMASH initiative.  Hardware from different vendors in the market today have support for DASH and SMASH and can be managed by Windows and System Center products.

The Web Services for Management (WS-Management) Specification describes a simple object access protocol (SOAP) for managing systems such as PCs, servers, devices, and other remotely manageable entities. The WS-Management protocol identifies a core set of web service specifications and usage requirements that expose a common set of operations central to all systems management. This includes the ability to do the following:

• Get, put (update), create, and delete individual resource instances, such as settings and dynamic values
• Enumerate the contents of containers and collections, such as large tables and logs
• Subscribe to events emitted by managed resources
• Execute specific management methods with strongly typed input and output parameters

WS-Management now an ISO/IEC standard

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations. This body ensures that products and technologies that reach the ISO standardization are of the highest quality, meeting international demands and requirements. ISO standards gain governmental and broader industry support and adoption.

The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) is a non-profit, non-governmental international standards organization that prepares and publishes International Standards for all electrical, electronic and related technologies – collectively known as “electrotechnology”.

We are pleased to report that on January 30, 2013, Web Services for Management (WS-Management or WS-Man) was adopted as an international ISO/IEC standard. With WS-MAN now an international standard, expect to see a wider range of products that will be manageable using WS-MAN.  Imagine being able to manage all types of devices in your datacenter using a consistent set of tools, practices, and skills.  This helps to simplify the datacenter and lower cost of both adoption and on-going management of systems as well as make related skillsets more valuable in the marketplace.

As an ISO/IEC standard, WS-Management, is uniquely positioned to play a key role in streamlining the IT world as more devices and solutions adopt it as the standard protocol for management.  The approval of WS-Management as an ISO/IEC standard is further evidence of the global interest in standards-based management of systems, applications, and devices.

Microsoft makes it easier for the rest of the industry to adopt standards based management

While Windows Server 2012 is the best Cloud OS, supporting the latest ISO/IEC standards such as WS-Management, Windows Server 2012 must interoperate with many devices and technologies in a predictable and standard fashion. To address this issue, and to help the industry adopt and embrace standards-based management, Microsoft has designed and implemented OMI (Open Management Infrastructure) as a small and scalable CIMOM which implements CIM and WS-Management. We contributed OMI as an open source project to Open Group in August 2010.

The public availability of OMI means that you can now easily compile and implement a standards-based management service into any device or platform from a free open-source package, by using the WS-Management ISO/IEC standard protocol and CIM. Our goals are (1) to remove obstacles that stand in the way of implementing standards-based management, so that every device in the world can be managed in a clear, consistent, coherent way; and (2), to nurture a rich ecosystem of standards-based management products.

Further Reading

The following is an architectural overview of the WS-Management stack:

The WS-Management 1.1 ISO/IEC specification can be found here.

The main WS-Management spec is composed of the following specifications available on the DMTF web site:

• WS-Management Management Resource Access: Web Services for Management (WS-Management) Specification

The post WS-Management ISO/IEC Standard appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

Windows Server 2012 Essentials is a significant milestone in our efforts to help cloud-enable small businesses and home offices. It is designed to help you protect business data, to allow highly secure access to the information you need from virtually anywhere by using almost any device, and to offer the flexibility to choose which applications and services you want to run on-premises and in the cloud—we have even made it easier than ever before to run Essentials itself in a hosted environment. Excitement about the release of Windows Server 2012 Essentials has been growing. In 8 weeks of public previews, we’ve had more than 23,000 downloads—far surpassing pre-release downloads of past versions.

Today I am pleased to tell you that Windows Server 2012 Essentials has reached the release to manufacturing (RTM) milestone. We are delivering the product to our hardware and ecosystem partners, and it will be generally available in all channels on November 1, with OEM partners shipping server systems by the end of the year.

I would like to encourage you to try Windows Server 2012 Essentials for yourself by visiting the Evaluation Center today to download a trial copy—and if you’re an MSDN or TechNet subscriber, you can download Essentials from those sites as well.

Let me share some quick product highlights with you:

• Enable a dynamic, modern work style with access from your devices by using Remote Web Access (RWA), and take advantage of Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 devices for a superior experience with rich modern “My Server” apps.
• Enjoy peace of mind knowing that your data is well-protected by complementing your on-site backups with Windows Azure Online Backup, as well as utilizing integrated support for the new Windows 8 File History feature.
• Choose the email and collaboration option that’s right for you, whether that’s in the cloud with Office 365 or a hosted service provider, or running on a local server.
• Quickly and easily respond to increasing data capacity needs with support for Storage Spaces, which allows you to create elastic, resilient storage for your files and folders.
• Run the line-of-business applications that you depend on by leveraging our greatly improved application compatibility, now with a single logo certification for all Windows Server 2012 editions.
• Purchase with confidence knowing that your technology investment can easily grow to Windows Server 2012 Standard if the needs of your business grow.
• Deploy today with full support for 19 languages, all releasing simultaneously.

We have seen some great initial press reviews of Windows Server 2012 Essentials, too. For example:

“The right tool for the job… Server Essentials makes client backups so simple that not doing them borders on criminal. Combined with the Microsoft Online Backup service [Windows Azure Online Backup] (and possibly with replication based on Hyper-V), the backup features make for a much more disaster-resistant small network. And the integration with Office 365 and Exchange (but mostly with Office 365) greatly reduces the complexity of user administration.”
-Ars Technica, A server for the rest of us: hands-on with Windows Server 2012 Essentials

“…ideal for a small business or a home office.”
-ZDNet, Windows Server 2012 Essentials: Beta preview

You can find more information on the Windows Server 2012 Essentials product page, and discover deeper technical information on the Windows Server 2012 Essentials TechCenter. If you are a Microsoft Partner, be sure to visit the Microsoft Partner Network and take advantage of the training opportunities we have available, including the upcoming Disti Bootcamps. And, of course, we would like to continue the great dialog we’ve started with you during the previews, so please continue to share your experiences and provide us with your feedback in the Windows Server 2012 Essentials Forum.

Thank you,
Sinead O’Donovan

The post Windows Server 2012 Essentials released to manufacturing, available for evaluation today! appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

We are very excited about the promise of Software Defined Networking (SDN) for enabling automation, flexibility, and reliability in the multi-tenant cloud.  Traditionally the control plane of networking has been proprietary, resulting in datacenter environments that are unable to respond effectively to the dynamically changing needs of today’s cloud workloads.  By enabling network control via software, we give customers the ability to configure and reconfigure their networks to match the changing requirements of their workloads, without compromising multi-tenant isolation and performance that would be expected from traditional networking.

Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1, Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) enable everyone to take advantage of the power of SDN in your datacenters.  Our integrated solution provides unparalleled automation, flexibility, and control.  The solution supports scalability for even the most mission-critical deployments.  At the same time, we provide a standards-based and open platform that is supported by a rich partner ecosystem.  Best of all, everything you need to deploy SDN is built right into these products, so you do not need to acquire separate management tools or product licenses.

Of course, these attributes of our SDN solution did not come about by accident.  Windows Server 2012 builds on our years of experience running massive datacenters for properties such as Hotmail, Bing, and Windows Azure.  This foundation of experience is why we can confidently say that Windows Server 2012 is the first operating system specifically built for the Cloud – for enabling the public, private, and hybrid cloud.

In this post, we introduce Software-Defined Networking and talk about its origins within our own datacenters.  We then discuss how Windows Server 2012 and VMM deliver an end-to-end SDN solution and how partners are extending the solution.  We then discuss our own experience using SDN and how you can get started deploying this exciting technology today.

What Is Software-Defined Networking (SDN)
Traditionally, networks were defined by their physical topology, how the servers, switches, and routers were cabled together.  That meant that once you built out your network, changes were costly and complex.  Certainly, this type of networking is simply not compatible with the notion of a lights-out datacenter or a cloud environment that needs flexibility to support varying workload demands.

With Software Defined Networking (SDN), software can dynamically configure the network, allowing it to adapt to changing needs.  An SDN solution can accomplish several things:

• Create virtual networks that run on top of the physical network.  In a multi-tenant cloud, a virtual network might represent a tenant’s network topology, complete with the tenant’s own IP addresses, subnets, and even routing topology.  Through SDN, virtual networks can be created dynamically, and they can support VM mobility throughout the datacenter while preserving the logical network abstraction.
• Control traffic flow within the datacenter.  Some classes of traffic may need forwarding to a particular appliance (or VM) for security analysis or monitoring.  You may need to create bandwidth guarantees or enforce bandwidth caps on particular workloads.   Through SDN, you can create these policies and dynamically change them according to the needs of your workloads.
• Create integrated policies that span the physical and virtual networks.  Through SDN, you can ensure that your physical network and endpoints handle traffic similarly.  For example, you may want to deploy common security profiles, or you may want to share monitoring and metering infrastructure across both physical and virtual switches.

In summary, SDN is about being able to configure end hosts and physical network elements, dynamically adjust policies for how traffic flows through the network, and create virtual network abstractions that support real-time VM instantiation and migration throughout the datacenter.  This definition of SDN is, in fact, broader, than the definition currently used by many industry players who only focus on configuration of physical network elements.  Our broader SDN definition includes programmability of end hosts, enabling end-to-end software control in the datacenter.  Our definition also supports real-time changes in response to VM placement and migration.  As we will see below, the integration of VM management and network control is important to facilitate automation and reliability in large-scale datacenters.

Origins of Software Defined Networking
As mentioned above, we at Microsoft have years of experience running massive datacenters for properties such as Bing, Hotmail, and Windows Azure.  This experience taught us several important principles about datacenter network design:

• Automation is critical:  We have found that the vast majority of network outages arise because of human error.  Networks need to be configured and managed in an autonomous fashion.
• Multi-tenancy demands network flexibility:  In environments such as Windows Azure, customers expect to have easy ways to on ramp their workloads.  They don’t want to change IP addresses or other network settings in order to move to the cloud.  The cloud needs to be able to give each tenant the illusion of a dedicated network, even though it is shared by multiple tenants.  Interestingly, we have found the need for multi-tenancy even in single-=use datacenters.  For example, we often need to run a production SharePoint environment as well as a test SharePoint deployment simultaneously within the same datacenter.  As much as possible, our test deployment needs to mirror the production deployment, but it is critical for the test deployment to use its own Active Directory and DNS infrastructure.  Of course, we don’t want to deploy physically separate servers for the production and test environments—that would be unreasonably expensive!
• Centralized control drives simplicity and reliability:  In our experience, virtual machine placement needs to be driven from a central management entity that understands workload needs, hardware capacity, and virtual networks.  This manager drives policies to the end hosts and, therefore, is also best positioned to coordinate the network changes required to support that VM placement.  This approach reduces the possibility of policy inconsistency in the network, reduces delays associated with propagating SDN policies, and simplifies configuration and management.

In fact, based on this datacenter experience, our colleagues in Microsoft Research published seminal work defining new ways to create virtual and physical networks.  This effort heavily influenced our approach to SDN in Windows Azure and Windows Server and in fact, was the foundation for much of the SDN work being done across the industry.

An End-to-End Solution in Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1, Virtual Machine Manager
Windows Server 2012 and VMM provide an end-to-end SDN solution for public, private, and hybrid clouds.  By building all the pieces as part of a solution—the hypervisor, the SDN control surface on the end host, and the management software—we ensure a set of seamless experiences for datacenter administrators.  All of the solution components work together to provide the most scalable and flexible platform for the cloud.

Our SDN approach consists of several different capabilities.

Hyper-V Network Virtualization delivers network flexibility for the cloud by providing the ability to create multi-tenant virtual networks on a shared physical network.  Each tenant gets a complete virtual network, including multiple virtual subnets and virtual routing.  (Some network virtualization solutions out there assume the tenant only has a single subnet!)  On each host, Hyper-V uses dynamically updatable SDN policies to associate a tenant network and properly direct traffic to the destination. The SDN policy also determines which VM’s these tenant VM’s are allowed to communicate with, providing the requisite isolation.  As a result, Hyper-V Network Virtualization allows tenant workloads to be placed anywhere in the physical datacenter.  Tenant networks even can use private IP addresses (which might overlap with addresses used by other tenants), allowing tenants to rapidly migrate their existing workloads to the cloud by bringing their own IP addresses.  In fact, Windows Server 2012 supports interoperable cross-premise connectivity, so you can seamlessly link your subnets in the public cloud back to your local network.

VMM plays a key role in automating configuration of SDN policies for Hyper-V Network Virtualization.  In VMM, you define and create tenant virtual networks as needed.  Note that because these networks are defined entirely in software, no reconfiguration of the physical network is needed.  VMM takes care of placing VM workloads and applying the necessary SDN policies to the hosts to create those virtual networks.  By applying VM placement decision and the SDN policy updates together, VMM provides a high degree of automation and centralized control, in keeping with our datacenter experience.  In addition, this integrated control plane speeds up policy distribution, reducing downtime and enabling more flexible VM placement and optimization.

Our SDN solution is further enabled through rich traffic control policies on the Hyper-V virtual switch.  On a per-VM basis, you can configure security policies that limit the types of traffic (and destinations).  You can reserve bandwidth to particular VMs, ensuring that mission-critical services can always access necessary network capacity.  You can even apply bandwidth caps, allowing you to avoid traffic starvation or enforce a variety of charging models.  What’s more, these network control policies are dynamic, so they can be adjusted in real-time.

VMM allows customers to unify the individual virtual switches on each Hyper-V host in the datacenter into a distributed logical switch that is dynamically programmed with SDN traffic control policies.  For example, you can define a profile for a set of VMs.  That profile might include the security and bandwidth controls that should be applied.  As it brings VMs up, VMM automatically programs the host virtual switch with the appropriate profile.  The profile moves from host to host as the VM is migrated.  The administrator is essentially defining a single logical datacenter switch, with VMM automating deployment of per-host and per-VM policies, ensuring consistency of SDN policies, and (as we have seen before) providing central control.

With Windows Server 2012, we are excited to introduce the Hyper-V Extensible Switch.  The switch provides a platform through which our partners can extend SDN policies within the switch.  In fact, one of the most common use cases for this extensibility is to integrate the virtual switch with the rest of the physical network infrastructure. A unique aspect of this extensibility is that multiple partners can extend the switch at the same time.  For example, InMon has built an extension that allows traffic monitoring to be done on the Hyper-V switch in the same way it is done on physical switches.  Another partner, NEC, has integrated the Hyper-V switch with their OpenFlow controller.  The NEC OpenFlow controller defines exactly how traffic from the source VM to the destination VM should be routed through the network; NEC solution is completely compatible with Hyper-V Network Virtualization, which defines the origin and destination VMs within the virtual network.  The NEC solution allows for easy configuration of virtual appliances such as load balancers, intrusion detection systems, and network monitoring solutions.

VMM handles the lifecycle and configuration of Hyper-V switch extensions.  In fact, these switch extensions essentially become part of the SDN language that VMM speaks to Hyper-V.  As VMs migrate across the datacenter, VMM and Hyper-V ensure that state information associated with the switch extension is also migrated to the new host.  VMM ensures that the destination host has the switch extensions required by the guest VM or tenant network.  This level of seamless extensibility is unique to the Hyper-V / System Center SDN solution.

Of course, our end-to-end solution recognizes that Hyper-V hosts are not the only components of a datacenter network.  VMM is able to dynamically provision key network elements such as load balancers, site-to-site VPNs, and Hyper-V Network Virtualization gateways.  At the end of the day, SDN is about end-to-end automation, flexibility, and control throughout the data center.

Built for Partners, Built with Partners
Our SDN solution is, from the ground up, designed with partners in mind.  It is open and flexible, allowing partners to offer value added capabilities.  Moreover, the SDN solution supports a close relationship between software and hardware.  Even though it is software-driven, SDN needs to take advantage of capabilities provided by network cards, switches, and routers.

We disagree with many in the industry who say that SDN should “commoditize” the network infrastructure.   In our view, SDN should provide the automation, flexibility, and control to allow you easily to take advantage of the capabilities of the infrastructure.  In fact, SDN should create new innovation opportunities for network hardware.  Customers can only benefit from new innovations across their datacenter.

Within our SDN solution, we have already touched on how partners can build extensions for the Hyper-V Extensible Switch.  In fact, multiple extensions can co-exist in the hypervisor switch, and they can all work in tandem with our other SDN elements, Hyper-V Network Virtualization and rich traffic control policies.  We support our partners with certification tests, interoperability plug fests, development tools, and close engineering support.

This spirit of partner cooperation is evident throughout our SDN solution.  Hyper-V Network Virtualization builds on IETF standard protocols (Generic Routing Encapsulation, or GRE), and together with partners from a variety of network silicon and switch manufacturers, we have published guidance on how GRE enables network virtualization.  This standards-based approach means that network cards and network switches can support and accelerate tenant logical network traffic.  In fact, our design includes tenant ID information in the packet, enabling network equipment to do tenant-specific accounting, policy control, or advanced processing.

Our open approach has enabled several partners to announce solutions that work with Hyper-V Network Virtualization.  For example, nAppliance and IVO Networks have both announced plans for network appliances that provide Hyper-V Network Virtualization gateways.  Stay tuned for more partner announcements shortly!

In addition, VMM supports pluggable interfaces, allowing it to configure arbitrary load balancers, site-to-site VPNs, and network virtualization gateways.  VMM can therefore interoperate with other SDN solutions or network control servers.

Production Tested, Production Used
As we have discussed, our SDN solution grew out of our experience running large datacenters and cloud services.  Needless to say, we have been able to validate our solution in these environments.  Within Microsoft, we are running a large, multi-tenant private cloud used for several mission-critical workloads.  Hyper-V Network Virtualization is in active use within that cloud today, orchestrating communication for tens of thousands of VMs running on over 4000 physical hosts.  As you might expect, our SDN algorithms and protocols are in active use within the Windows Azure datacenter, supporting our Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering that was announced last month.

At the same time, throughout the development of Windows Server 2012 and VMM, we have been working closely with enterprise and hoster customers to validate and deploy our SDN solution.  Many of these customers are already running production services using these cloud components.

Ready for You – and Built Right In!
Software Defined Networking (SDN) holds the promise to revolutionize cloud networks by bringing a new level of automation, flexibility, and control to the network environment.  As we have seen, our SDN approach takes an integrated, end-to-end view which brings simplicity, performance, and reliability to the solution.  At the same time, we have built our solution using open standards and pluggable interfaces.  Just as important, we have been developing a rich partner ecosystem, so you can integrate best-of-breed capabilities across the industry with Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1, Virtual Machine Manager.

Most important, all of the tools you need to deploy Software Defined Networking are built right in to Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1, Virtual Machine Manager.  You do not need to buy separate management tools or acquire separate product editions.  Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1, Virtual Machine Manager deliver the best value for public, private, and hybrid clouds.

With the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) and impending launch of Windows Server 2012, our SDN solution is ready for you to deploy.  We are looking forward to hearing about your experiences building public, private, and hybrid clouds on our SDN platform.

Appendix: Some Resources for Getting Started with SDN
Windows Server® 2012 Hyper-V Network Virtualization Survival Guide helps you get started deploying SDN and network virtualization in your datacenter.

The Hyper-V Network Virtualization Overview gives you a technical overview of the feature and how it works.

The Internet RFC titled NVGRE: Network Virtualization using Generic Routing Encapsulation gives you the details behind the packet encapsulation format Hyper-V network virtualization uses for virtualizing network traffic.

The Hyper-V Extensible Switch article gives you an architectural overview about Hyper-V switch extensions.  You can also learn about Writing Hyper-V Switch Extensions.

The blog article about Cloud Datacenter Network Architecture describes how you can put everything together in order to build a cloud that uses SDN.

Sandeep K. Singhal, GM, Windows Networking

Vijay Tewari, Principal Group Program Manager, System Center Virtual Machine Manager

The post Software Defined Networking, Enabled in Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1, Virtual Machine Manager appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

The post Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate Essentials available now appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

• We spent a lot of time listening to our partners and customers. 
• We focused on simplicity and flexibility.
• Users are more productive – they can do what they want with fewer steps.
• Our Partners have more ways to deploy than ever before – Windows Server 2012 Essentials is a perfect example of that.
• Our focus on partners and customers allowed us to work across groups effectively to reduce the seams and deliver a coherent and comprehensive solution.
• We love our partners and customers and can’t wait for you to deploy Windows Server 2012 and enjoy the release that you’ve all been asking us for.

Hi, I’m Joe Nalewabau, Group Program Manager on the Windows Server Essentials team, and today I’m excited to introduce the beta for Windows Server 2012 Essentials (Essentials 2012).

The beta is a significant engineering milestone for the team. We’d obviously like to get as much feedback on the product as possible and you can see and give feedback on the beta through the Windows Server Essentials 2012 Beta Essentials forum.  We are working hard to deliver Essentials 2012 this year and so your feedback on the beta will be critical to us over the next few weeks as we work towards a release candidate and an eventual RTM.

As David Fabritius mentioned in his post last week, Essentials 2012 represents a significant milestone for the product. We have made some changes to the way that we think about the first-server market (SMBs, home offices, etc.) and the products that we offer in this space based on feedback from our customers and partners. This post will provide some high-level insight on how the engineering strategy as we built Essentials 2012. We will follow up with additional blog posts containing deeper information about specific features in the coming weeks.

From an engineering perspective, we planned Essentials 2012 around four core principles:

• Simplicity and flexibility for customers and partners
• Better together with Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8
• Increased device support
• Continued integration with Cloud Services

Simplicity and flexibility for customers and partners

Historically, the engineering team has developed and supported a number of solution products based on Windows Server. The current in-market products developed and supported by our team include: Windows Small Business Server (SBS) 2011 Standard, Windows SBS 2011 Essentials, Windows Home Server (WHS) 2011, and Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials. We also support previous versions of SBS Standard and WHS.

These products are not targeted at the traditional IT Pros. We spend a lot of time creating simple and integrated experiences that will work for non-IT Pros with the help of our broader partner ecosystem of OEMs, Value-Added Resellers and the Small Business Solution Specialist Community.

We approached simplicity and flexibility for customers in Essentials 2012 in a number of ways:

• Simplified product line-up. After considerable debate and feedback from our customers and partners we decided to simplify the overall product line-up to a single product. During this simplification process, we decided to bring together as much core functionality from our other products as possible in Essentials 2012 (e.g., media features from Home Server and Storage Server Essentials). This simplification, along with the flexibility described later, will enable partners to design and deploy the best solution for customers based on their specific business needs.
• Simplified moving past 25 users. One of the major pieces of feedback about SBS 2011 Essentials was that once a customer had grown beyond the 25 user limit they had to migrate to Windows Server Standard. After the migration, key SBS-specific features that they had come to depend on (e.g., client backup, Remote Web Access), were no longer available.We wanted to address this issue in Essentials 2012 and so we now allow customers to do an in-place upgrade to Windows Server 2012 Standard. Now customers are running Windows Server 2012 Standard without any of the licensing limitations of Essentials 2012, but the majority of Essentials 2012 functionality continues to operate and is fully supported for up to 75 users and 75 devices. (Note that while there are no restrictions placed on the number of users/devices that can be added to a Windows Server 2012 Standard environment, there are maximum supportability limits for the Essentials 2012 features.)
• Flexibility for customers to choose how they want to consume email (on-premises, hosted, or cloud). A major area of flexibility for Essentials 2012 was providing partners and customers with the choice of where they wanted their email service to be located. In SBS 2011 Standard, email was installed and always assumed to be on premises. In SBS 2011 Essentials, we had an add-in for Office 365 connectivity, but no integration was possible with an existing Exchange Server running locally on a second server.In Essentials 2012, you will be able to choose where email services reside from the following choices:

1. 1. On-Premises. Essentials 2012 will integrate with an on-premises Exchange server running on a second server, which can be either physical or virtual.
   2. Office 365. If customers have an Office 365 account they can choose to use this for their email.
   3. Hosted Exchange. Hosted Exchange providers can offer add-ins to Essentials 2012 that will allow customers to select this option. We know that there are many different types of hosted email providers. While we have focused on hosted Exchange email providers, we engineered the product to be email service agnostic which allows non Exchange based email providers to be integrated through this mechanism (note that this specific feature is not available in the beta).

Better together with Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8

Windows Server 2012 enables an amazing number of scenarios and key technologies for customers. In Essentials 2012 we looked through the huge number of Windows Server features and chose specific ones to deeply integrate. I’d like to call out a few major technologies or processes from Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 that we have integrated:

• Storage Spaces. Storage Spaces offers a number of compelling scenarios for first-server environments including easy capacity expansion and resiliency for physical disk failures using commodity disk hardware. The ability to simply add a disk drive and increase capacity has long been a request across from customers and partners and in Essentials 2012 we have integrated Storage Spaces through wizards and alerts to make sure it is simple and easy to use.
• File History. File History is a new Windows 8 technology that allows you to store changes made to files on your client machine and then easily find and restore previous versions. In Essentials 2012, we have made it simple to configure Windows 8 clients to turn File History on and point the File History folder to the Essentials 2012 server. This is a great experience for Windows 8 clients. This capability is turned on for them and they get the added safely of having their File History stored on the server.
• Application Compatibility. In the past, several SBS customers reported not being able to get support from Line of Business (LOB) application providers as SBS was not listed as a supported OS even though SBS was built on a supported Windows Server operating system.  We have worked hard to ensure that Essentials 2012 is a part of the overall Windows Server 2012 Application Logo Certification program. Applications that pass the Windows Server 2012 Application Logo Certification requirements will also meet the requirements of working on Essentials 2012.  We also significantly expanded the Essentials 2012 application compatibility testing environment.  These efforts should allow ISVs to offer much better support statements going forward for Essentials 2012.

Of course, customers also get a whole range of Windows Server 2012 technologies for free which makes the release even more compelling.

Increased Device support

Another area of focus for the team was around extending our level of support for devices. We know that customers using our existing products have multiple devices and they want to access information and/or control their server from these devices. In Essentials 2012 we have expanded our device support in a number of different ways:

• Remote Web Access (RWA). RWA is an existing feature that many of our customers love. In Essentials 2012, we made a number of improvements with one of the biggest being making sure that RWA works well on touch first devices including the iPad and Windows 8 based touch devices. RWA also supports media streaming from the server and we have improved the access to files and folders on the server.
• Native Windows 8 Metro application. We are building a Windows 8 Metro application for accessing Essentials 2012 servers. The existing client LaunchPad will continue to be available for Windows 8, but we wanted to build a Windows 8 native application to allow people to quickly and easily access and control their server. We are very excited about this application as it allows for some very cool scenarios – especially around people who are travelling and need to access files and folders or media from their server. This is our first client application that supports an off-line mode for people who are travelling – another request from customers. In addition, we implemented many of the Windows 8 standard interfaces in this application which allows for a range of new scenarios natively from Windows 8, e.g., simple uploading and searching of files on Essentials 2012.
• Updated Windows Phone application. We have updated the existing Windows Phone 7 application to work with Essentials 2012 servers – including the ability to access files and folders on the server (this functionality was not available in the previous version).
• Web Services for extensibility. This is more of a developer facing feature, but we are very excited about the possibilities this opens up. Essentials 2012 has a set of web services that allow developers to write a new set of client applications for the server. As an implementation note, we use these services inside the Windows 8 Metro and Windows Phone applications. Developers can now write different applications/gadgets, etc., to interact with an Essentials 2012 server.

Continue integrating with Cloud Services

Another major focus for us is continuing to integrate with cloud services. Based on research and feedback from our customers we know that many people are looking for ways to integrate with cloud services and we wanted to ensure that Essentials 2012 had great integration with Microsoft’s offerings:

• Office 365 Integration. In SBS 2011 Essentials, we had deep integration with Office 365 through the Office 365 Integration Module. We have integrated this module directly into Essentials 2012 and updated the support to display more information about Office 365 as well as update our functionality, e.g., bulk importing of Office 365 accounts into Essentials 2012. Office 365 is completely optional – this is an option that people can choose as an email service when they configure their server.
• Microsoft Online Backup Service. Essentials 2012 has integration with the Microsoft Online Backup Service which makes it simple for customers to register their server and do online backups of it. This provides an additional layer of protection above the existing Server backup mechanisms.

Essentials 2012 has a rich SDK that allows customers and partners to integrate additional services into the server. We made sure that existing add-ins for SBS 2011 Essentials and WHS 2011 continue to run in Essentials 2012.

Summary

We are excited about Essentials 2012 and thrilled to be able to get the beta in your hands. The engineering team is eagerly looking forward to hearing your feedback which will help make Essentials 2012 a great release.

The post Download the beta release of Windows Server 2012 Essentials today! appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

Each of you belongs to the Windows community.  You can choose to be vested in the community or not.  Many of you have already chosen to participate in the community and have made Windows one of the most robust communities out there.  I’m particularly excited by the Windows PowerShell Survival Guide (http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/183.windows-powershell-survival-guide-en-us.aspx), a rich, curated offering of information about Windows Powershell.

But the reality is that getting the benefits of that community is not as easy as it could be and participate could be higher.  In today’s blog, Kathy Watanabe, Senior Director of the Server and Cloud Division Information Experience team, describes some of the innovative thinking and tools that we are delivering in Windows Server 2012 to help the community help itself.  You can do your job much better by leveraging the wisdom and knowledge of the community – so take some time to learn how to use these tools.  But don’t stop there. Start – or increase – your participation in the community. It has never been easier.

With Windows Server 2012, the Information Experience team rethought how we deliver a great information experience to our customers. It is based on a few primary principles:

• Content aggregation. We integrated links to our content and to content created by the community (more on that later). This provides rich, broad, and diverse product and scenario guidance, where you will find answers as you plan, deploy, and operate Windows Server 2012 in your enterprise. One of the platforms that illustrates this concept of content aggregation (or curation) is the PowerShell Script Explorer, which provides curated access to scripts.
• Community. The idea of a community—you—is central to shaping Windows Server 2012 guidance. We created the information experience based on your feedback, and we depend on you to extend it.
• Solutions and scenarios. We provide these in the IT Pro space (in the TechNet library) and in the developer space (on Windows Server Development). These scenarios and solutions are continually updated, to reflect your evolving network needs.

Content Aggregation (Curation)
There are several types of content aggregation offerings. We describe two in this section:

• A tool called Microsoft Script Explorer
• TechNet  Wiki-based “survival guides”

Microsoft Script Explorer
One important piece of our content aggregation offering is a tool called Microsoft Script Explorer.  Microsoft Script Explorer for Windows PowerShell helps scripters find Windows PowerShell scripts, snippets, modules, and how-to guidance in online repositories such as the TechNet Script Center Repository, PoshCode, local or network file systems and Bing Search Repository.

Leveraging the Concepts of a Semantic Web for Curation
A semantic web takes the information that is typically hidden inside product documentation, blog posts, support forums and so forth – and enables that information to be defined in a predictable manner – which, of course, enables discovery of that information. A great example of this is a PowerShell Script. Scripts are typically just text hidden inside web pages; search engines such as Bing / Google and Yahoo can’t discriminate whether you are looking for a page containing the words “PowerShell Script” or for pages that actually contain valid PowerShell scripts.

The illustration below attempts to illustrate that PowerShell Scripts can be stored in a number of different places – inside local file systems, network shares, web sites, online forums and script repositories. When the scripts exist inside a web page such as in a blog or a threaded discussion we believe HTML 5’s Micro-Data will enable us to include additional meta-data that will describe the specific parts of the page that contain scripts and information related to the scripts name and purpose that will better enable search. For repositories such as TechNet and POSH we believe OData provides a great programmatic means of accessing these repositories.

The PowerShell Script Explorer surfaces content from major repositories, blog sites and forums by smartly aggregating (or curating) that content. The illustration below shows the high-level design of Script Explorer. The dotted line in the middle illustrates the divide between code and repositories that run/exist inside a corporate network as opposed to those outside of the corporate network. One of the most interesting aspects of Script Explorer is something we have called the Aggregation Service. This service is responsible for helping aggregate scripts from different sources based on your requirements. The service can take content from any number of repositories, regardless of what protocol they use or what format the scripts are exposed in and then aggregate the functionality and expose that data as an OData based feed.

As you can see in the illustration, there are typically two instances of the Aggregation Service running. The first (on the right-hand side) runs on Windows Azure and is responsible for aggregating feeds from different Internet based repositories such as TechNet or Posh. The second (on the left-hand side) runs along-side Script Explorer and takes responsibility for retrieving scripts from the external aggregation service as well as internal resources such as your local file system and any corporate repositories you want to stand up.

The Aggregation Service includes a standard way to write new providers enabling you to search alternative sources of scripts and have them exposed directly inside Script Explorer simply by changing the configuration file. Furthermore, this idea is extensible; you can create/shape your own provider, to use your favorite search engine or to us a schema other than the one used by PowerShell Script Explorer. For more information on creating a new repository or creating a new provider take a look at the sample posted on Codeplex.

Survival Guides
Another curation offering is the survival guides. The Survival Guides are a TechNet  Wiki offering of links to information around a specific product, technology or set of scenarios. Created and managed by the community (including Microsoft), survival guides map information by lifecycle, area, scenario, or other criteria with links to top information. Links can point to any content and often include a mix of information from different Microsoft sites and community sites like blogs, wikis, and YouTube.

Survival guides provide community stewarded, up-to-date information conveniently organized for users and professionals. The Windows PowerShell Survival Guide, System Center Survival Guide, Hyper-V Survival Guide and others on the TechNet Wiki also are helpful for planning training, deployments and finding more information by experts in different regions. Contributors benefit from increased recognition.

Join the TechNet Wiki and share your favorite links, add thoughtful comments or better yet, create a new survival guide for a product or technology that you have a passion for!

Community
Community is a big part of the information experience, as we work together with you to extend and expand the guidance offerings.  Here are the ways we are contributing, how our efforts impact your experience, and how you can get involved:

• Events and error guidance, guidance added by the Community
• Forum 2 Wiki. Your common forum questions with our responses are posted to the Wiki
• Suggestion Box. Recommend areas where you’d like us to add information
• Script Center. A host of great PowerShell scripts by all of you (and us!).

Events and Errors
Community sourced error and events harness the troubleshooting experiences of community. Using topics that address a single error or event, customers can find current troubleshooting information on the TechNet Wiki using search or, in the near future, forwarding from the Windows Event Viewer. When Event Viewer forwarding goes live, contributors will be able to create new topics that can be found by the forwarding system and used automatically.

This approach helps you, our customers. Since the content is on a Wiki, it can be continuously updated to reflect the latest techniques, insights and best practices. Since the Wiki shares a powerful profile system in common with the TechNet Forums, Blogs, Galleries and other Microsoft places, contributors are recognized and can achieve Wiki fame by creating or revising articles that reach thousands of views.

Join the TechNet Wiki and share your troubleshooting experience. You can update Event ID 1058 – Group Policy Preprocessing (Network) or over 50 others or create your own. Contributing is easy and appreciated by everyone!

Forum 2 Wiki
Forum Curation. This effort converts some of the highest-viewed forum threads on different TechNet forums into TechNet Wiki articles to increase clarity. In some of our customer roundtables (and feedback from others in the community), we learned forum answers are sometimes “lost” in the cacophony of multiple responses, tangential information, and updates to previous answers. Answers can also be difficult to find.

For an example, visit Renaming a Windows Server 2008 Active Directory Domain or try one of these.

By moving into an article on the TechNet Wiki, community can easily modify information inline rather than through additional comments. Content can be tagged, stewarded and easily shared with others. This increases discoverability and clarity for customers and can increase recognition for contributors (a common theme in community, no?).

You can make a difference. When on your favorite forum, convert a popular thread into a Wiki article. Include links from the forum to the Wiki article and the Wiki article back to the forum as a way to acknowledge sources and the work of community. Then ask your networks to review and update.

Suggestion Box
Suggestion Box. The Suggestion Box is a place where you can share ideas and suggestions, prioritize them, and help deliver community content. Our goal here is to help identify information needed by the community and to work together with community members to curate, develop, or point to that information, whether it’s on member blogs, forums, TechNet Wiki articles, Microsoft.com or other sites. The information experience can only improve with community feedback.

While the current iteration of the Suggestion Box does not share the same profile as the TechNet Wiki and other Microsoft community platforms, it is easy to suggest new ideas, vote on existing ideas, or volunteer to deliver content for an existing request. It also provides a prioritized list of ideas for times you want to contribute, but need an idea. This helps you get the content you need (and the recognition you deserve for contributing).

Script Center
For a similar experience focused exclusively on scripts, visit the Script Center. Download resources and applications for Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008, SharePoint, System Center, Office, and other products. New resources are added frequently, so check often and see what’s new.  Join us!

Scripting Games. The Scripting Games are the premier learning event of the year for IT Pros, developers, and others who want to learn Windows PowerShell. Managed by Scripting Guy Ed Wilson, the Games are a great way to jump into the PowerShell scripting community (or raise your status as an expert in PowerShell) in a fun, accommodating and rewarding way. Meet other community members, write cool scripts and receive feedback from a distinguished panel of guest judges.

The Scripting Games helps community by raising awareness, fostering engagement and networking, learn some neat tricks and coding techniques, and win some cool prizes. Check out Ed’s top ten reasons to participate and mark your calendar for next year’s event!

Solutions and Scenarios
The integration of our products and technologies into a holistic solution to real customer problems drove our information experience.  As we shaped these scenarios, we considered the new value propositions offered by Windows Server 2012:

• Building Your Cloud Infrastructure: Scenario Overview
  You can leverage new features around network and storage virtualization that, when combined with improved server virtualization, enable the building of your cloud infrastructure based on Windows Server 2012. This will help with your strategy in delivering Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or building hosted services.
• Dynamic Access Control: Scenario Overview
  You can apply data governance across your file servers to control who can access information and to audit who has accessed information.
• Hosting-Friendly Web Server Platform (IIS): Scenario Overview
  Rapid and efficient scaling of your web applications makes for a cloud-ready web platform. Enhanced security, application initialization, NUMA-aware scalability, and the sharing of resources across sites allows for this rapid scaling with minimal management overhead.
• Increasing Server, Storage, and Network Availability: Scenario Overview
  New experiences in Windows Server 2012 work together to improve availability, performance, and reliability at the single-server and multiple-server (scale-up and scale-out) levels.

Thanks for reviewing just some of the exciting information experiences we’re creating for Windows Server 2012. We hope you enjoy them!

The post The Windows Server 2012 Information Experience appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

As we looked at the task of getting the industry to adopt standards-based management, we saw a couple of challenges. 

The first challenge was to convince the industry that standards-based management was credible and able to do complete management.  We proved that with our big investments in standards-based management in Windows Server 2012.  In this release, we are fully committed to standards-based management as the primary management path; DCOM is provided only for backwards compatibility. 

The next big challenge was to help the industry implement standards-based management.  The existing open source implementations have a number of problems that stopped the ecosystem from embracing this approach.

In today’s blog, Otto Helweg and Wassim Fayed, Program Managers in the Windows Management team, describe what we did to address that concern.  It is truly an exciting time to be working in the computer industry – as a community, we are all about to take this to the next level and our customers are going to reap huge rewards.  What could be better than that?

Microsoft and The Open Group are going big on standards-based management with a new, free, open source technology called Open Management Infrastructure or OMI (formerly known as NanoWBEM).   We are working with Arista and Cisco to port OMI to their network switches for our Windows Azure and cloud data centers.  Jeffrey Snover did a technology demonstration at TechEd Europe in which he used a common set of standards-based tools to manage a base-motherboard controller on a server, a Windows operating system, and an Arista switch running OMI.

The public availability of OMI means that you can now easily compile and implement a standards-based management service into any device or platform from a free open-source package. Our goals are to remove all obstacles that stand in the way of implementing standards-based management so that every device in the world can be managed in a clear, consistent, coherent way and to nurture spur a rich ecosystem of standards-based management products.

Today, datacenters  comprise a slew of heterogeneous devices supplied by different hardware and platform vendors and requiring different tools and management processes. Companies are forced to write their own abstraction layer or to be locked into a single vendor, which limits their choice and agility. This problem can be solved only by moving the industry to adopt the right standard for datacenter devices and platform abstractions.

In addition, the growth of cloud-based computing is , by definition, driving demand for more automation, which, in turn, will require the existence of a solid foundation built upon management standards. For standards-based management to satisfy today’s cloud management demands, it must be sophisticated enough to support the diverse set of devices that are required and it must be easy to implement by hardware and platform vendors alike.  The DMTF CIM and WSMAN standards are up to the task, but implementing them effectively has been a challenge.  Open Management Infrastructure (OMI) addresses this problem.

Easy and Diverse Device Support
Let’s start with a little history. Windows has long been a leader in implementing CIM, beginning with WMI (Windows Management Infrastructure). The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Common Information Model (CIM) is an open standard that defines how managed elements are represented as a common set of objects and defines the relationships between them using associations.

When WMI was first introduced as an out-of-box install for Windows NT 4.0, it implemented early versions of the standards and schemas. WMI used DCOM for remote management, because no standard protocol was defined at that time. In Windows Server 2012, we invested heavily in standards and remote management, synching WMI with the latest DMTF standards and protocols.

The CIM standard is sophisticated and flexible enough to use as a management model for all devices – particularly datacenter devices. Although these DMTF standards have been around for years, they have been a challenge to implement, and existing implementations have been too large for mobile and embedded devices.  To address these challenges, Microsoft has built a highly portable, small footprint, high performance CIM Object Manager called OMI that is designed specifically to implement the DMTF standards. We then worked with The Open Group to make the source code for OMI available to everyone under an Apache 2 license.  OMI is written to be easy to implement in Linux and UNIX systems.

Partners that adopt OMI will get the following:

• DMTF Standards Support: OMI implements its CIMOM server according to the DMTF standard.
• Small System Support: OMI is designed to also be implemented in small systems (including embedded and mobile systems).
• Easy Implementation: Greatly shortened path to implementing WS-Management and CIM in your devices/platforms.
• Remote Manageability: Instant remote manageability from Windows and non-Windows clients and servers as well as other WS-Management-enabled platforms.
• API compatibility with WMI:  Providers and management applications can be written on Linux and Windows by using the same APIs.
• Support for CIM IDE: Tools for generating and developing CIM providers using tools, such as Visual Studio’s CIM IDE.
• Optional PowerShell Support: If OMI providers use a set of documented conventions, Windows PowerShell will discover them and auto-generate cmdlets from them (This is how many of the 2300+ cmdlets in Windows Server 2012 are implemented).

OMI Details
For developers, OMI’s small footprint (250KB base size with a working set memory usage of 1MB) and high quality code will help reduce the complexity of developing a high performance, stable standards-based management stack. For IT pros, OMI greatly amplifies your effectiveness and productivity by increasing the number and types of devices you can manage and by unifying the management experience with standard-based management and automation tools, such as Windows PowerShell and System Center, and other management solutions.

OMI includes the following components and tools in its implementation of a CIM server.

Extensibility
OMI uses a provider model to enable developers to extend OMI to their specific device or platform. Historically, providers have been very hard to write, which made them costly and unstable. OMI leverages a greatly simplified provider model that is also being used by WMI in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8. In short, OMI simplifies implementation for the developer by providing the following:

• Next Generation Provider Interface
• Compatible with the new WMI provider interface in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8
• Generation of provider skeletons (omigen)
• Generation of concrete CIM class data structures and code
• Provider registration tool (omireg)

The development model begins by specifying what needs to be managed.  From the specification, the omigen tools generates a set of C data structures and code that implements management model.  The developer adds their code to the skeleton  and registers the provider.

OMI is for Embedded and Mobile Systems
Embedded and mobile device management might be one of the most demanding tasks for a management technology, because they have the most significant processor and memory constraints. We figured that if we could build a management technology that meets their needs, OMI should be well suited to address the management needs of any device. Therefore, to keep OMI small and ideal for embedded systems, the following design characteristics were implemented:

• Server object size less than 250 kilobytes
• Server implemented entirely in C
• Provider interface is C
• Repository-less server
• Concrete provider classes yield less code
• Iterative size optimization
• Diskless operation

Security
Security matters.  Ever since Bill Gates’s famous Trustworthy Computing memo, we committed ourselves to the Secure Development Lifecycle Model. Security is a primary factor in all aspects of our development and coding process. Despite OMI’s small size, OMI implements the following security capabilities:

• HTTPS (SSL)
• HTTP Basic Authentication
• Local Authentication
• Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) support
• Out-of-process providers

• Run as requestor
• Run as server
• Run as designated user

Great! How Do I Get OMI?
Microsoft has partnered with The Open Group to create a hardware, software, and developer community to leverage, support, and enhance OMI. You can download OMI and/or get more details from The Open Group’s project site: http://omi.opengroup.org. In the near future, you will see this site and community grow and support more detailed documentation, contribution facilities, as well as OMI focused developer conferences.

For specific questions, please reach out to ottoh@microsoft.com

The post Open Management Infrastructure appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

Microsoft has been running services on the Internet for quite some time now, but things fundamentally changed a few years ago leading up to Steve Ballmer’s famous quote, “This is the bet for the company. For the cloud, we’re all in.” We have all the oars in the boat pulling in the same direction and learning from each other to deliver the best cloud products. We are taking the lessons from running cloud services and feeding them into our products to make them better. During our planning for Windows Server 2012, we spent a lot of time with our cloud services to understand what worked well and where their pain points were. When you run services at the scale we are running things, every little problem gets amplified and every improvement helps enormously. These learnings are translated into dozens and dozens of features in the areas of performance, automating everything, supporting datacenter topologies, continuous availability, and minimizing mean-time-to-detection (MTTD)/mean-time-to-recovery (MTTR). In today’s blog, Mukul Sabharwal, a software development engineer on the Bing team, describes a few of the features of Windows Server 2012, their effect on the Bing Service, and why Bing is adopting and deploying Windows Server 2012 as fast as they can. As you’ll see, Windows Server 2012 is truly a cloud-optimized operating system.

With the recent announcement of the Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate (RC), we at Bing.com considered how we might benefit from some of the operating system’s new features. Bing.com is a cloud service that runs on thousands of computers spanning many datacenters across the globe. Performance is a key component in running a successful cloud service such as Bing. Bing serves thousands of user queries every second, and users demand both relevancy and speed in those results.

Our deployment of Windows Server 2012 leveraged four key new features, in particular:

• Built-in Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5, included with Windows Server 2012, including the background garbage collection and associated improved latencies
• Improved performance at startup, enabled by the multicore JIT functionality of .NET 4.5
• Ability to collect call stacks for 64-bit .NET JITted applications
• Evaluation of Hyper-V 3 (the version of Hyper-V in Window Server 2012)

Pre-installed .NET Framework 4.5
Our rendering tier runs entirely on managed code, relying on the power of the .NET Framework and the accompanying web frameworks, ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC. One of the primary reasons for writing managed code is the improved developer productivity and run-time safety afforded by the CLR. These also have performance costs; for example, Garbage Collection (GC).

Server background GC
.NET 4.5 introduces Background GC for Server applications. Background GC was released in .NET 4 for client-side applications, and it was a hit, which is why we were really excited when Windows Server 2012 brought it to the server. And of course, we were gleeful when we saw the results!

This graph of InternalRequestLatency shows the time our application spends doing non-I/O work. (Just so you know, we set goals around making our 99th percentile faster.)

In the following graph, note that the majority of these gains come from spending less time dealing with the managed memory we create (garbage collecting) as part of servicing a request. (Note that the dates are coordinated with all the graphs in this post.)

Another measure of optimal performance—and an indicator of server health for ASP.NET applications—is the number of requests that are queued in the ASP.NET pipeline. This is shown in the following graph. Note the sharp decline on 5/25!

Upgrading to Windows Server 2012 can have this same positive impact for your managed applications. Less time spent garbage collecting is more time spent serving user requests. The end result is less latency and better throughput for your services.

Multicore JIT
Another great feature that is available in Windows Server 2012 via .NET 4.5 is JIT-compiling by using multiple cores. The feature is a profile-guided optimization; a background thread compiles methods that are likely to be required by the executing thread, and in an ideal case, the application methods are already JIT compiled when they are needed to run.

This feature is already enabled for ASP.NET applications, which makes it trivial to upgrade—do nothing, and let your ASP.NET applications get multicore JIT automatically.

You may be wondering: Why do startup times matter for server-side applications? The hope is that you restart your services only when needed, and at a time of your choosing so that it can be done during off-peak hours. But what if your application crashes?

The case for startup time is critical for service availability. When a service goes down and can recover quickly, it can be the difference between a total system outage vs. a degraded (but functional) experience.
And the startup time improvements, you ask?

This 50 percent reduction in startup time gives our operational staff relief that in case a service goes down, it’ll start back up twice as fast!

Taking call stacks on your production servers

Sample-based profiling in production
Also new to Windows Server 2012 is the ability to collect call stacks for 64-bit .NET applications that are JIT compiled.

We use performance counters as our primary monitoring mechanism, and as the first line of notification to our operational staff. They range from the ones we’ve discussed here (time in GC, and ASP.NET requests queued) to other important ones such as %CPU time and number of exceptions thrown.

Performance counters are extremely valuable for detecting performance degradation because they give insight into operational health. However, they are usually not sufficient to diagnose the “root cause” of a performance problem. So let’s say a performance counter spiked. For example, our %CPU time doubled, which in turn impacted latency. What’s our next step? With Windows Server 2012, our next step is now to enable low-overhead sample-based profiling.

Windows Server 2012 introduces the ability to perform sample-based profiling on 64-bit, JIT-compiled .NET applications via the Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) system. If you’re familiar with ETW, you’ll know that it’s a system-wide service that does not require process restarts; it’s non-invasive (in other words, no attaching to a process), and depending on the events you subscribe to, it also has low overhead: approximately 10 percent CPU cost when profiling is active.

The upward trend of %CPU time spent only increased from 80 percent to 90 percent. This translates to roughly equal percentage degradation in latencies, as shown in the following graph.

A 10 percent hit to performance can be acceptable at times when it is critical to diagnose the “root cause” of a performance problem.

We’ve spoken here about sample based profiling, but this feature extends to many other types of ETW events, including context switch events and ReadyThread events. For example, not only can you analyze CPU-bound problems, but also you can attempt to resolve problems that are stemming from I/O or thread-scheduling. (Note that enabling context-switch analysis is much more costly than profiling, with close to a 30 percent impact on CPU in our applications case.)

Sometimes there are problems that are only reproducible in a production environment, at scale. The ability to turn on a low-overhead logging facility that can profile your system is an incredible advantage —and with Windows Server 2012, managed applications now have the full support and parity with their native counterparts.

(Note that while Windows Server 2008 introduced the ability to take call stacks on sample profile ETW events, it did not work for 64-bit applications that were JITted.)

Hyper-V 3 and guest NUMA support
Before Windows Server 2012, virtualization implied overhead, even with all the accompanying benefits. Specifically, the cost of a software indirection imposed by virtualization was not acceptable. Moreover, the limitation on virtual cores (4) proved to be a throughput bottleneck in our synthetic lab testing.

However, with Windows Server 2012 comes Hyper-V 3, and with it a host of “scale” features. In particular, we were particularly excited about guest NUMA support. The ability to detect the NUMA topology is critical for making intelligent decisions about memory allocation; minimizing cross-node memory accesses is sometimes the key ingredient to making applications faster.

With the new Windows Server 2012 implementation, and with the accompanying NUMA efficiency from within a guest operating system, we are reevaluating using Hyper-V 3. We anticipate that Hyper-V will allow us to meet our performance targets, while also delivering large cost savings.

Cloud business and cloud-optimized operating system
Bing.com has already seen significant improvements by switching to Windows Server 2012 with the public RC. We basically cut %CPU time usage in half for critical servicing of managed applications (including GC) and startup times when restarting services. We achieved significant performance gains by making process monitoring easier and building it into the operating system. And we are exploring how we can use NUMA efficiency with Hyper-V 3 to enhance our service with virtualization. Bing.com-—a recognizably successful and large-scale, enterprise cloud service—represents how we built Windows Server 2012 to be a truly cloud-optimized operating system.

Bing.com is a cloud service. It’s a fast cloud service, and it runs on thousands of computers that span many datacenters across the globe. And now it’s optimized with Windows Server 2012.

Summary
The promise of the new Windows Server 2012 features intrigued the Bing.com team as we considered migrating to the latest operating system. What began as exploratory evaluations of the impact of a migration quickly led to a full-scale deployment, which benefited greatly from the built-in .NET 4.5 functionality, multicore JIT functionality, and potentially, the much-improved Hyper-V 3 functionality.

Now that you understand the inner workings of these Bing.com optimizations, one last reminder before you depart: All Bing.com search results worldwide are being served by Windows Server 2012!

• Built-in .NET 4.5, included with Windows Server 2012, including the background garbage collection and associated improved latencies
• Improved performance at startup, enabled by the multicore JIT functionality of .NET 4.5
• Ability to collect call stacks for 64-bit .NET JITted applications
• A clear future to Hyper-V 3 adoption

The post Bing.com runs on Windows Server 2012! appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.