As we introduce many innovations for Windows Server, support for older versions along with security updates released while the version is supported will come to an end. Windows Server 2012, and 2012 R2 End of Extended support is approaching per the Lifecycle Policy: Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 Extended Support will end on October 10, 2023.

Customers are upgrading to the latest release of Windows Server and applying the latest innovation to modernize their IT environment. However, we understand that Windows Server run many business-critical applications and it may take more time for customers to modernize. We are glad to share that we have great options and benefits for our customers to protect their workloads while they transform with Azure and the latest release of Windows Server.

Today, we are announcing Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 Extended Security Updates.

Customers can migrate their workloads to Azure and get free Extended Security Updates for three more years, only in Azure. Customers running these releases of Windows Server on-premises will have the option to purchase Extended Security Updates.

Furthermore, we are also announcing, one additional year of extended security update for Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 only on Azure.

To get started with planning Windows Server 2012 and 2012 end of support, please read our end-of-support blog for additional guidance, refer to Extended Security Updates Frequently Asked Questions, and learn about the latest in Azure Migration and Modernization Program.

The post Plan your Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 End of Support appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

Since we announced the availability of the Windows Server 2022 preview on Insiders, thousands of customers have downloaded or tried it on Azure, and we received lots of helpful feedback. Many customers have indicated that they would like to start validating the new Windows Server 2022 release sooner. As a result, we decided to make the Windows Server 2022 preview also available on Azure.

We are happy to share that the preview of Windows Server is now available on the Evaluation Center and our partners and Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) ecosystem can access it for validation.  Whether you are planning to implement Windows Server in Azure, in your datacenter, or through a Microsoft partner, we encourage you to try this preview and leverage the innovation we have included in Windows Server 2022.

More importantly, customers with Software Assurance (SA) get more from their existing Windows Server deployments and have upgrade rights to the latest release. That way they can begin taking advantage of all that is best of breed in Windows Server 2022. Additionally, if they’re thinking about moving workloads to the cloud, SA also gets them access to Azure Hybrid Benefit where they can bring Windows Server and SQL Server on-premises licenses to Azure. We would like to encourage customers to take advantage of the current preview to accelerate deployments in their environments when Windows Server 2022 is generally available later this calendar year.

Note that we do not recommend deploying the Windows Sever 2022 preview for production workloads. Secondly, all Insider’s customers can use Windows Server 2022 and access it on the Evaluation Center.

If you’d like to learn more about Windows Server 2022, we have you covered

• Register for the upcoming webinar, Maximize Your Windows Server Hybrid Strategy with Azure, Thursday, June 10, 2021, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM Pacific Time.
• Secondly, join us for an upcoming Ask Microsoft Anything for all your Windows Server questions on Wednesday, June 2, 2021, from 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM Pacific Time.

The post Windows Server 2022 is now in preview on the Evaluation Center appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

Windows Admin Center, your favorite server management tool, is now available in preview in Azure. This new capability enables seamless and granular management of your Windows Server Azure IaaS virtual machines (VMs) from within the Azure portal.

Here is a short video highlighting some of the capabilities included with Windows Admin Center in the Azure portal.

Get the job done with simplicity and convenience

Windows Admin Center in Azure unlocks incredible capabilities for the Azure portal by providing you with an interface to manage your Windows Server virtual machines. By default, the Azure portal provides a singular view for virtual machine management and the essential elements to manage your infrastructure. With the addition of Windows Admin Center, we have supplemented this great management experience with additional opportunities such as an enhanced view of virtual machine usage, performance monitoring, viewing of events, and much more. We expect this to reduce the need for you to remote desktop into your virtual machine for administration improving your experience as you deploy and maintain virtual machines with or without a GUI.

Familiar UI

You can now configure, troubleshoot, and perform maintenance tasks with the same Windows Admin Center UI that you know and love. Beyond a consistent interface, you can manage your files, view expired certificates, monitor performance, view critical events, use PowerShell, use an in-browser RDP session, and much more without leaving the Azure portal. We now provide cloud capabilities that were once only available to Windows Admin Center users on-premises.

Designed for the cloud

While the Windows Admin Center you see in the Azure portal is familiar and has most of the same functionality our Windows Server customers love and use, it is tailored to provide a cloud-first experience. This version of Windows Admin Center was created to focus more on the cloud experience when running IaaS virtual machines in Azure, and we are continuously adding new capabilities to improve the experience for our customers. In the Azure portal, Windows Admin Center is always kept up to date, seamlessly giving you the latest and greatest features. In addition, Windows Admin Center is backed by the support infrastructure that provides reliability for all your other Azure services. You now have a great way to manage your Windows Server virtual machines in Azure.

Secure

Windows Admin Center in the Azure portal also helps you manage security. It features an integrated certificate experience that provides a secure connection supporting both public and private IP addresses. The experience automates the provisioning and managing of a certificate for your instance of Windows Admin Center by using existing Azure services.

Getting started

Windows Admin Center in the Azure portal is available to all Windows Server customers on Azure running Windows Server 2016 or higher virtual machines in the public cloud. Create a new virtual machine today or deploy Windows Admin Center on your existing infrastructure. You can begin managing your virtual machines in Azure using Windows Admin Center by navigating to the “Windows Admin Center (preview)” blade under “Settings” in the Virtual Machine Azure portal UI.

Learn more

New to Windows Admin Center? Check out this introduction video.

Interested in on-premises Windows Admin Center? Read our documentation.

Learn more about Windows Admin Center v2103.

The post Announcing public preview of Windows Admin Center in the Azure portal appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

Update September 1, 2021: Windows Server 2022 is now generally available, click below to find out more.

Today we are announcing that Windows Server 2022 is now in preview, the next release in our Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC), which will be generally available later this calendar year. It builds on Windows Server 2019, our fastest-adopted Windows Server ever. This release includes advanced multi-layer security, hybrid capabilities with Azure, and a flexible platform to modernize applications with containers.

Windows Server 2022

Learn more about the latest version of Windows Server

Learn more

Over the years, companies like Forever 21 and Sentara Healthcare have relied on Windows Server to run their business-critical workloads. A big thank you to all the members of the Windows Server community and our customers and partners for your support and feedback that inspired the innovation we built into this new release.

Advanced multi-layer security

With a growing number of cyber-security threats and the impact of incidents escalating quickly, security is a top priority for our customers. Windows Server 2022 includes new security capabilities like secured-core server and secure connectivity.

Secured-core server brings powerful threat protection together to provide multi-layer security across hardware, firmware, and the operating system. It uses the Trusted Platform Module 2.0 and System Guard to boot up Windows Server securely and minimize risk from firmware vulnerabilities. Secured-core server also includes virtualization-based security (VBS) features like Credential Guard and Hypervisor-protected code integrity (HVCI). Credential Guard provides preventative defense for sensitive assets like credentials, and HVCI applies hardware—rooted security to prevent advanced malware from tampering with the system.

Secured connectivity adds an additional layer of security during transport for advanced protection. Windows Server 2022 improves connection security with faster and more secure encrypted hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS) and transport layer security (TLS) 1.3 enabled by default. Customers can also further secure server communications with industry-standard AES-256 encryption, which now supports server message block (SMB) protocol and better controls.

Hybrid capabilities with Azure

We are bringing new capabilities that enable customers to take advantage of cloud innovation with their on-premises investments. Azure Arc and Storage Migration Service are two key hybrid capabilities that work best with Windows Server 2022.

Azure Arc enables customers to manage, secure, and govern Windows Server on-premises, at the edge, or in multi-cloud environments from a single control plane in Azure. Through Azure Arc, customers can easily employ Azure management capabilities such as Azure Policy, Azure Monitor, and Azure Defender for those servers. What’s more, a few simple clicks in Windows Admin Center can enable connectivity to Azure Arc. Further, we have enhanced Windows Admin Center v2103 with significantly improved virtual machine management, a simpler event viewer, and many more updates. Windows Admin Center is also available in the Azure portal.

Windows Server 2022 enhances the seamless connectivity of file servers on-premises to file servers on Azure. Updates to Storage Migration Service allow customers to migrate file servers from certain network access storage (NAS) and Windows File Servers to Windows Servers on Azure. Using Storage Migration Service to migrate data to servers allows customers to maintain low latency while reducing their on-premises storage footprint.

Flexible application platform

Customers use Windows Server to run large-scale and distributed applications. Consequently, we have placed relentless focus on bringing platform capabilities and tools that improve developer velocity and support for business-critical workloads like SQL Server.

In this release, we are adding several platform improvements for Windows Containers, including application compatibility and the Windows Container experience with Kubernetes. A major improvement includes reducing the Windows Container image size, which leads to faster download time and better performance. In addition, you can now run applications that depend on Azure Active Directory with group Managed Services Accounts (gMSA) without domain joining the container host. Furthermore, there are several other enhancements that simplify the Windows Container experience with Kubernetes. These enhancements include support for host-process containers for node configuration, IPv6, and consistent network policy implementation with Calico.

In addition to platform improvements, we have an updated Windows Admin Center tool that makes it easy to containerize .NET applications. Once the application is in a container, you can host it on Azure Container Registry to then deploy it to other Azure services, including Azure Kubernetes Service.

Windows Server 2022 supports business-critical and large-scale applications like SQL Server that require 48TB of memory and 2,048 logical cores running on 64 physical sockets.

Try out the new Windows Server 2022 preview

Thank you for being a valuable Windows Server customer and, through your passion and feedback, helping us shape this new release. Watch our Microsoft Ignite session for more details about the release of Windows Server 2022.

Don’t forget to:

• Learn more about Windows Server Software Assurance benefits
  • Software Assurance customers can take advantage of New Version Rights and will be able to upgrade to Windows Server 2022
• Try Windows Server 2022 LTSC in preview:
  • Try Windows Server 2022 on Azure
• Download Windows Admin Center

The post Announcing Windows Server 2022—now in preview appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

Tune in at 9:00 AM PST on October 29, 2020 for an all-in-one experience where you will learn about the latest and greatest on Windows Server and have the opportunity to participate in a number of fun activities. There will be a sweepstakes and pop-up challenges that can win you one of over 50 prizes, including Surface Pro’s, Surface Go’s, and Microsoft branded coolers!

Register now for Windows Server Summit 2020.

This year we have awesome new innovation and capabilities we plan to talk about around Windows Server on-premises, managing a hybrid environment, and for running Windows Server on Azure. While we certainly have a full agenda, here are just some of the topics and speakers you’ll have the opportunity to hear from.

• Windows Server best practices and what’s next—Jeff Woolsey, Ned Pyle
• Innovations like Azure Automanage and Azure Arc enabled servers—Dean Wells, Ryan Puffer
• Special topics around Azure Stack HCI, including Azure Kubernetes Service—Cosmos Darwin, Ben Armstrong, Matt McSpirit
• Latest on System Center—Srividya Varanasi

For a refresher on some of the recent Windows Server announcements that we’ll be digging deeper into at the Windows Server Summit, read our Windows Server Summit 2020 announcement blog.

Before you tune in, here are some things you should know:

• While the event is going on, feel free to ask questions in the chat and one of our experts will respond.
• If you choose to participate in the sweepstakes, you can track your progress in the number of points you’ve generated directly from the platform (official rules available in the resources tab).
• Engage with us through social media using the Twitter, LinkedIn, or Tech Community icons in the platform.

Register now

Now that we’ve given you a list of reasons why this year’s Windows Server Summit is one that you will not want to miss, we look forward to seeing you there. Visit the latest Windows Server Tech Community post for Windows Server resources, including training, documentation, and our brand-new Learning Paths.

The post One week to go! Windows Server Summit 2020 appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

Come watch and learn from technical Windows Server content covered by industry-leading experts. Some of the heavy hitters you’ll hear from include leaders from the product team like Jeff Woolsey, Ned Pyle, Cosmos Darwin, and Dean Wells, who will all be present to answer your questions throughout the summit. Keep track of your knowledge throughout and get a chance to win one of our more than 50 sweepstake prizes at the end! You really don’t want to miss this!

Register now for the limited slots at Windows Server Summit 2020.

Here’s a sneak peek of the topics we will cover:

• Windows Server Best Practices
• New Windows Server innovation that run best on Azure including Azure Automanage, Windows Admin Center on Azure, AKS on Azure Stack HCI
• What’s new and next for Windows Server

In the meantime, check out our latest and greatest products:

Azure Automanage

Simplify IT management with optimized, automated operations across the entire lifecycle of dev/test and production virtual machines (VMs) with Azure Automanage, now available in public preview. Learn more about Azure Automanage and join the public preview.

Windows Admin Center in Azure portal

Your favorite server management tool is now available in public preview in Azure! This built-in functionality will allow you to manage your Windows Server OS anywhere, right from the Azure portal. Learn more about Windows Admin Center in Azure.

AKS on Azure Stack HCI

Containerize your apps and manage your on-premises Kubernetes clusters with Azure Kubernetes Service on Azure Stack HCI, now available in public preview. You can now securely use Azure Management Services to manage your clusters and deploy your apps anywhere—on the cloud, on-premises, or the edge. Learn more about Azure Kubernetes Service on Azure Stack HCI and register to join the preview.

Register now!

As you can see, we have lots of great new content to share with you. Stay tuned as we continue to provide more about Windows Server Summit 2020. We can’t wait to see you at the event!

The post Announcing Windows Server Summit 2020 appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

Operations Manager

System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is one of the most widely used monitoring platforms by enterprise customers and we continue to improve it to better suit customer’s needs.

Change Tracking for Management Pack

In System Center Operations Manager, user roles are defined to change monitoring settings for applications and services through management packs. There can be multiple users associated with a single user role. Previously, there was no tracking to identify the user making changes and when. System Center Operations Manager 2019 UR2 includes Change Tracking, a feature that admins use to track and report changes on management packs and management pack objects. All these changes are logged in Operations Manager Datawarehouse database. There are three new reports that are available to display changes: Management Pack History, Management Pack Objects, and Overrides Tracking. For more details, please refer to the documentation.

Improvements in Scheduled maintenance mode

Schedule maintenance mode (MM) was a feature introduced in System Center Operations Manager 2019. This capability enables administrators to choose a time in the future to set a computer’s maintenance mode. Currently, if there is a conflict in the maintenance mode window for an object, the newly updated end time overwrites the existing scheduled time. This results in false alerts during the maintenance window. The noise generated by these alerts can result in missing real issues, which can be costly for the business. With 2019 UR2, if there is a conflict in maintenance mode end time then an object will exit maintenance mode at the furthest end time defined for the object. For more details, please refer to the maintenance mode documentation.

Enhancement on web console

Favorite Reports

The functionality of Favorite Reports has been part of System Center Operations Manager web console (2012/2016) but was missing in System Center Operations Manager 2019. Without Favorite Reports, running ad-hoc System Center Operations Manager reports on a regular basis was not possible resulting in overhead of launching the Operations Console and loss of productivity. With UR2, a user can now run and view Favorite Reports under Web Console and My Workspace. For more details, please refer to the documentation.

Folders in Monitoring Tab

Dashboards in the web console of System Center Operations Manager 2019 is a popular feature – with many customers using dashboards extensively. But not having the ability to group them in folders is leading to a long list of dashboards, which is cumbersome to manage. In UR2, we are introducing the Folder feature in the System Center Operations Manager 2019 web console. Users can now create folders to group dashboards based on management packs. For more details, please refer to the documentation.

Supportability addition in Linux OS support

In the System Center Operations Manager 2019 UR2, we have added support for CentOS 8 under Universal Linux (RPM package).

In addition, for details of other improvements and bug fixes that are part of this release, please refer to this Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB) article.

Virtual Machine Manager

Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) makes it easier for enterprises to manage their Windows Server deployments at scale. Here are some of the additional capabilities added to System Center Virtual Machine Manager as part of 2019 UR2.

Support for managing Windows Server 2012R2 hosts

Enterprises using hardware that is not capable of being upgraded to the latest Windows Server operating system (OS) are often faced with the challenge of managing host servers on various Windows Server OS versions. To make IT administration easy in these environments, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2019 UR2 will now support the management of Windows Server 2012R2 servers as hosts, SOFS, and remote library shares in addition to the already supported versions of Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2019 OS servers. For details of all the hardware OS versions supported, please refer to the System Center Virtual Machine Manager documentation.

Set affinity between vNICs and pNICs

The affinity between virtual network adapters and physical adapters brings in flexibility to route network traffic across teamed pNICs.

With this feature, customers can increase throughput by mapping RDMA capable physical adapter with an RDMA settings enabled vNIC. Customers can also route specific types of traffic (e.g. live migration) to a higher-bandwidth physical adapter. In hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) deployment scenarios, by specifying affinity, customers can leverage SMB multichannel to meet high throughput for SMB traffic.  For details on the feature refer to the documentation.

Support management of VMware hosts: ESXi 6.7 host support

Enterprises looking to migrate their VMware environments to Hyper-V need the fabric management tool to support both VMware and Hyper-V hosts during the process of migration. System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2019 UR2 extends management support to ESXI 6.7 hosts and vCenter 6.7. For details on ESXI server support refer to the VMM fabric documentation.

Using the next generation of address standard Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) has been a regulatory requirement for some enterprises. IPv6 also provides an expanded number of address spaces available, which can be supported in the sprawling enterprise datacenters that are spinning up more machines every day. To provide users the flexibility to use IPv6, VMM 2019 UR2 introduces support to IPv6 address for tenant VM networks. You will be able to set an IPv6 address for tenant VM networks when deploying NC, Gateway, and SLB through VMM console and PowerShell.

IPv6 support for SDN

Using the next generation of Internet Protocol address standard Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) has been a regulatory requirement for some enterprises. IPv6 also provides an expanded number of address spaces available, which can be supported in the sprawling enterprise datacenters that are spinning up more machines every day. To provide users the flexibility to use IPv6, VMM 2019 UR2 introduces support to IPv6 address for tenant VM networks. You will be able to set an IPv6 address for tenant VM networks when deploying NC, Gateway, and SLB through VMM console and PowerShell.

Simplifying networking in Virtual Machine Manager: Configuring logical switches

The journey towards more simple, intuitive, and user-friendly networking management through VMM started in VMM 2019 UR1 where efforts were focused on making logical network creation simpler through the use of smart defaults, text explanation of different options, and visual representations. We are now taking this journey further by simplifying the logical switch creation. For details on changes in the console UX please refer to the documentation here.

Linux OS support for guests

In System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2019 UR2, we have added support for the following versions of Linux OS in guests – Red Hat 8.0, Centos 8, Debian 10, and ubuntu 20.04 Linux Operating system.

For other improvements and bug fixes that are part of this release, please refer to the Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB) article.

Data Protection Manager

System Center Data Protection Manager offers enterprise-grade backup and recovery of critical workloads. System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) offers enterprise-grade backup and recovery of critical workloads. System Center Data Protection Manager 2019 UR2 brings key advancements in improving backup performance and introduces capabilities to enable new backup scenarios.

Support for SQL Server Failover Cluster Instance (FCI) using Cluster Shared Volume (CSV)

A lot of SQL server users are looking to deploy SQL Server on a Failover Cluster instead of using traditional cluster storage. This is advantageous for a couple of reasons:

• Users don’t need to carve out separate LUNs for each SQL instance.
• CSV makes SQL nodes highly available, resilient, and fault tolerant by automatically routing traffic in case of node failure.

Why backup is needed for SQL Server on CSV?

SQL Server on CSVs provides users with fault tolerance, high availability, and resiliency, but it doesn’t guarantee that their data is safe in the event of accidental deletion of data, data corruption, or ransomware attacks. In these scenarios, users would want a solution that they can use to restore their “clean” data from a previous point in time.

System Center Data Protection Manager 2019 UR2 version introduces the support for protecting and recovering SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances on Cluster Shared Volumes. If you were already using SQL Server on CSVs, you can go ahead and start protecting your SQL DBs with DPM 2019 UR2.

Optimized Volume to Volume Migration

System Center Data Protection Manager 2019 supports a key customer requirement– volume migration for backup volumes. There are several reasons why volume migration is needed:

• Filesystem data in the old backup volume can have fragmentation.
• The old backup volume could have reached the limit of the maximum allowed storage size.
• There could be hardware issues with the current storage box.

What’s new with System Center Data Protection Manager 2019 UR2 volume migration?

System Center Data Protection Manager 2019 UR2 introduces optimized volume migration, which allows users to move protected workloads from an old volume to a new volume in a much faster way. The enhanced migration process migrates only active backup copy (Active Replica) to the new volume. All the new recovery points are created on the new volume while existing recovery points are maintained on the existing volume. This less data transfer compared to the full volume migration approach makes the optimized volume migration process finishes quickly.

SQL Server 2019 support as System Center Data Protection Manager database

SQL Server 2019 is the latest version of SQL Server. Since a lot of SQL users have migrated to SQL 2019, System Center Data Protection Manager has also introduced support for SQL 2019 as its database starting System Center Data Protection Manager 2019 UR2 release.

Now you can install SQL Server 2019 on a remote server, or on the System Center Data Protection Manager server. The database must be installed and running before you install System Center Data Protection Manager.

Offline Backup using Azure Data Box

With System Center Data Protection Manager 2019 UR1 we announced the integration and now with UR2, this feature is open for any System Center Data Protection Manager customer to try out.

With this integration, System Center Data Protection Manager customers can overcome the challenge of moving terabytes of backup data from on-premises to Azure storage. This also reduces the time a customer takes to onboard to Azure backup for long term retention of on-premises workload backups. This also reduces the time a customer takes to onboard to Azure backup for long-term retention of on-premises workload backups.

In addition, here is the list of issues that have been fixed as part of the UR2 release for System Center Data Protection Manager.

Service Manager

Service Manager provides an integrated platform for automating and adapting your organization’s IT service management best practices. With UR2, we have released a new version of Exchange Connector (4.0) which adds support to OAuth 2.0 based authentication to connect to Exchange Online. In addition, for details of other improvements and bug fixes that are part of this release, please refer to the Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB) article.

Orchestrator

We hope the investments in new features and bug fixes as part of this Update Rollup benefit and enhance your System Center deployments. We will continue to keep up these improvements and are eager to hear your feedback. Please reach out to us via email at scpmft@microsoft.com. For new feature requests, please post on our User Voice forums for System Center Operations Manager, Virtual Machine Manager, and System Center Data Protection Manager.

The post Second update rollup for System Center 2019 released appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

In the next major release, Microsoft will raise the security standard for Windows Server hardware certification to include these capabilities by default. This change will give customers increased confidence they are deploying Windows Server on platforms that maximize platform integrity without having to modify their RFP process. The new Windows Server certification will require TPM 2.0 installed and enabled by default. For systems that have the next major Windows Server preinstalled, Secure Boot will be enabled by default. These requirements apply to servers where Windows Server will run, including bare metal, virtual machines (guests) running on Hyper-V or on third party hypervisors approved through the Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP).

These changes will enhance and automate built-in security on the next major Windows Server release.

Secure boot is a fundamental security tool since it ensures that systems boot into a trusted operating system environment so that malware like rootkits cannot subvert the boot process. Since code running during the boot process has privileged access to system resources and performs many critical security initialization steps, malicious code that tries to hijack the boot process can have a very harmful impact. There have been a number of articles written in recent years that document the serious and detrimental outcomes that vulnerabilities like this can expose. By ensuring that only code signed by trusted authorities runs during the boot process, secure boot mitigates this security risk and also provides a solid foundation for the security platform of the operating system.

TPM2.0 provides hardware support for securely performing measurements for attestation and storing keys. The Secure Boot process described earlier can be measured using the TPM2.0 where each step in the boot process is captured and stored securely by the TPM. Anyone operating the system can then use a service that can ask for the TPM to provide a tamper-evident report to check whether the system booted as expected. BitLocker is a native volume encryption solution for Windows Server and leverages the TPM2.0 to provide enhanced security. BitLocker leverages the TPM to ensure that volumes are only decrypted if the system booted as expected by the measurements captured in the TPM. Paired with Network Unlock, the TPM provides a scalable and secure management solution for BitLocker encryption ensuring that sensitive data is kept more secure.

Looking ahead, secure boot and TPM2.0 will serve as the core building blocks for Windows Server security and provide customers with strengthened baseline security for systems available from the ecosystem. The enforcement of these requirements will be applied to new server platforms introduced to market after January 1, 2021. Existing server platforms will include Additional Qualification certification to help customers identify systems that meet these requirements, similar to the current Assurance AQ for Windows Server 2019 today.

The post Microsoft raises the security standard for next major Windows Server release appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

Many of our customers are building new microservice inspired applications using the latest design patterns, yet often their core business functions run on applications developed before Kubernetes was even a project. The past months have presented new challenges and opportunities for many of us, some customers are experiencing unprecedented demand on their services while others are looking for ways to consolidate workloads and reduce costs in order to save jobs. We have partnered with customers to help them address both challenges using Windows Server containers in our Azure Kubernetes Service. Often customers can consolidate multiple workloads onto the same node improving density while also increasing uptime and availability. When demand increases, it’s easy to scale up the services and nodes to meet the real-time needs of the business.

Woolworths (Woolies) is a leading innovator in the Australian supermarket and grocery industry that has experienced these benefits firsthand during the global health pandemic as Nick Eshkenazi, Chief Digital Technology Officer, says:

“As demand for our eCommerce services has soared in the wake of the global health crisis, we’ve had to scale our online capability incredibly fast. Traffic to our website has doubled and our app use is up more than 320 percent. 

With Azure Kubernetes Service we have been able to remove some of the manual steps previously required in our releases – speeding the process up and increasing the reliability of our delivery.

Together with Microsoft, we’ve been able to keep our site and app readily available for our customers at a critical time, and avoided the digital queuing many other retailers have had to implement.“

In the last five years, we have made significant progress with Azure Kubernetes. Today we are up to version 1.18 and since then over 70,000 changes have been merged into the project. We also had to work through key customer workflows in AKS, enabling multiple node pools and different patching and update models, and we continue to make improvements within the community and the service to make running applications based on Linux or Windows easier and more reliable. For example, in Kubernetes version 1.17, runtime class support supplants the need to use complex and often error-prone taints and tolerations to ensure Windows Server containers land only on Windows Server hosts. In Kubernetes version 1.19, we intend to expand this feature to improve version compatibility and isolation using Hyper-V isolated containers.

We know many of you have been waiting for Windows Server containers in AKS to become generally available so you can move into production—we’re very excited to hear your success stories in the coming days and weeks, and for customers still evaluating your path to containers, this is a great time to get started. In either case, please leave us your feedback here.

To learn more about recent advancements in Kubernetes version 1.18, specifically for AKS, read this blog post. Lastly, we would like to take the moment to thank every contributor and customer, without whom, today’s announcement wouldn’t be possible. We’re proud to be part of the broader and vibrant Kubernetes community.

The post Windows Server container support in Azure Kubernetes Service is now generally available appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

On March 14, 2019, Microsoft announced the availability of System Center 2019 for Windows Server 2019 to support management of Windows Server 2019 and a host of other new management capabilities. Today we are announcing that the first update rollup release (UR1) to the System Center 2019 suite is now available! Customers can download UR1 for System Center 2019 from Microsoft Update as well as other channels. This update covers System Center Operations Manager, Virtual Machine Manager, Data Protection Manager, Orchestrator, and Service Manager. In this update, we are releasing new features in several of the products within the System Center suite. If you’d like to learn more about what those new features are, keep reading!

Operations Manager

Operations Manager is one of the most widely used monitoring platforms by enterprise customers and we have continued to improve it to better suit customer’s needs.

Group Managed Service Account (gMSA)

Operations Manager 2019 UR1 adds support for gMSA accounts, adding extra security and reducing management overhead for administrators. Operations Manager has several components including management servers, gateways, agents, an operations database, a data warehouse, and it uses several accounts for its services. Managing account credentials, password expiry, and account rollover presents a formidable overhead for the administrator. Any mistake made, to reset a password to an account before expiration, for example, can lead to a catastrophic failure in monitoring. A group Managed Service Account is a managed domain account in Windows that takes the burden off the administrator and provides automatic password management.

Integrated patching for Operations Manager management server

Operations Manager patching, simplified! When Microsoft releases an update to Operations Manager, it can be quite onerous to perform patching on a deployment as there are several steps. They include the following:

• Update the software bits of the management server.
• Update the Operations Database schema.
• Update to the latest management packs.

These steps are not very scalable across a large Operations Manager estate. The all-new management server patch installer in Operations Manager 2019 UR1 simplifies these steps and the patching of an Operations Manager environment.

Linux monitoring

Operations Manager has supported heterogenous environments for a long time. Many customers have Windows Server and Linux environments, and use Operations Manager to monitor both. One piece of feedback we received from Linux customers was that the agent was losing connection with the Operations Manager management server, which was due to an overload of monitoring workflows running. We addressed this reliability issue in Operations Manager 2019 UR1. You can also now tune the performance of the Linux agent by selecting the specific resources that help you monitor them best. You can also use Operations Manager to monitor Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, and instead of having a different management pack for each Linux distro, and each version, you can now work with just one Linux management pack. This alleviates the need for maintaining multiple Linux management packs and simplifies administration.

Management packs

Besides investing in the core Operations Manager platform, we have added new functionality to the management packs.

Storage Spaces Direct management pack

The Storage Spaces Direct management pack has been enhanced to support monitoring at all layers of the stack, including physical disks, servers, the storage pool, the network, and volumes, which show health and performance metrics across the stack.

Azure management pack

The Azure management pack enables monitoring of Azure resources from Operations Manager and enables a single pane of glass across on-premises and Azure. With the new feature, “Resource groups support”, customers can select specific resource group(s) under a subscription and choose the specific service types they want to monitor. With HTML5 dashboard support in Azure management pack, customers can view Azure resources and alerts for any subscription, resource group, or service type in the Operations Manager web console.

Here is where you can download the Azure management pack and Storage Spaces Direct management pack.

You can find more updates we’ve made in Operations Manager UR1 in this article.

Virtual Machine Manager

Support for replicated library server content

Large enterprises usually have multi-site datacenter deployments to cater to various offices across the globe, and a local library server for easier access to files to facilitate virtual machine (VM) deployment. This is done to avoid any network latencies leading to a poor deployment experience. Enterprises use replication technologies to ensure that library files are in sync and consistent across datacenters, which ensures uniform VM deployment. Virtual Machine Manager 2019 UR1 now supports the management of library servers which are replicated. You can use any replication technologies such as distributed file system replication (DFSR) to replicate and manage the shares through Virtual Machine Manager. This ensures that the fabric has consistent virtual hard disk (VHD) images, templates, and other artifacts.

Simplifying networking

We understand that managing networks in Virtual Machine Manager has become a complex process for customers, which is why we’ve begun simplifying it and providing in-product descriptions, visual aids through graphical representations, and integrated wizards for the setup. In Virtual Machine Manager 2019 UR1, there is a new logical network creation experience. You can also view the dependencies across all the networking elements in Virtual Machine Manager. We will continue down the path for simplifying networking in future releases.

Networking for Storage Spaces Direct deployment

Customers are increasingly adopting Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) thanks to the lower cost of ownership that HCI provides. Storage Spaces Direct, a key technology for HCI, can be deployed and managed using Virtual Machine Manager. To provide the high performance network which is needed for the Storage Spaces Direct storage traffic, customers will now be able to configure data center bridging (DCB) settings for the Storage Spaces Direct cluster.

For details of other improvements and bug fixes that are part of this release, please refer to this Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB) article.

Data Protection Manager

Windows Server supports Resilient File System (ReFS) for greater resiliency, availability, and scalability of various workloads. With Data Protection Manager 2019 UR1, you can backup workloads running on ReFS. You can also backup the workloads which are deployed on a ReFS volume with deduplication enabled.

Server Core installation option, which is without the GUI/desktop experience, provides for a smaller OS footprint and better security.Most customers now deploy server roles and applications on Server Core. With Data Protection Manager 2019, you now run the Data Protection Manager server on Server Core.

For easier onboarding to Azure Backup and to use Azure Storage for long term retention needs, Data Protection Manager now supports Azure Data Box for creating the initial backup. This eliminates the need for using the network for transferring the initial replica, which can take a long time. This feature is currently in preview. If you would like to use it, please send an email to systemcenterfeedback@microsoft.com.

Data Protection Manager has also seen significant investment in improving the performance of backup jobs. Please refer to this KB article for more details on the release of Data Protection Manager 2019 UR1.

Orchestrator and Service Manager

We’re happy to let you know that significant updates have been made to Orchestrator and Service Manager 2019. You can read more about the improvements made to Orchestrator, and learn more about how we’ve enhanced Service Manager 2019 in update rollup one.

We hope you are as excited as we are about releasing System Center 2019 UR1. We look forward to receiving your feedback!

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