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.

Thought I would share an article or two from the Ask Premier Field Engineering Platform Team Blog.

I think everyone love’s checklists that you can just run through to make sure you didn’t miss anything and that your environment is good to go, right?  Well, how about this, Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Best Practices (In Easy Checklist Form)? A checklist that uses real world best practices for Windows Server 2012 on Hyper-V Replica, Cluster Aware Updating (CAU), Network Virtualization and the Hyper-V Extensible Switch?  They promise to keep the list fresh and will be posting updates when they have them. So, try to make sure you subscribe to the feed for their blog.

As you know or maybe not, we have written about the issue about Slow Login and Slow Boot numerous times over the last year in an effort to address numerous tiny little issues that can impact a systems time to startup.  Well, the Supportability Team has put together a collection 90 hotfixes for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Systems. This is a huge accomplishment and I believe will address a lot of the issues that customers have had with their Boot times. Here is the link to the post from the ASK PFE Platforms team, Slow Boot Slow Login (SBSL) Hotfix Rollup for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 Available Today!

You can also go read the KB from the support team directly here, An enterprise hotfix rollup is available for Windows 7 Sp1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1.

Hope you find these article helpful.

Kevin Beares
Senior Community Lead
Windows Server and System Center Group

The post Real World Best Practices for Hyper-V and update on Slow Login Hotfixes from the Premier Field Engineering Platform Team appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

Get on the wait list for an event in Belgrade, Serbia on February 11

Get on the wait list for an event in Perth, Australia on February 11

Get on the wait list for an event in Brisbane, Australia on February 12

Register now for an event in Bangkok, Thailand on February 27

If you’re in the neighborhood of one of these events, I urge you to register if you can or get on the wait list if you’re close to one of the sold-out sessions. You’ll be glad you did!

Thanks,

Christa Anderson

The post Final Stops for the Windows Server 2012 Community Roadshow: Australia, Serbia, and Thailand! appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

• Register for Introduction to Hyper-V  and Microsoft Virtualization for VMware Professionals  today.
• Attend all or some of Introduction to Hyper-V on Thursday, January 24^th and Microsoft Virtualization for VMware Professionals on Wednesday, January 30^th. Both classes are from 8am – 5pm PST
• Because you registered, you will get a follow up mail when the full course is made available online at the Microsoft Virtual Academy

Did I mention that the events are FREE? Both of these courses are designed for IT Pros that are either new to Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V or have experience with other virtualization technologies like Citrix or VMware.

There is another Jump Start course coming in late February , Microsoft Tools for VMware Integration/Migration Jump Start, The date is TBD. We will make sure to post a link to it when we have a date and registration link.

Hope you can make it and that you find these courses helpful.

The post Free Microsoft Virtual Academy Courses on Hyper-V and Microsoft Virtualization for VMware Professionals appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

If you’re interested in learning how Microsoft technologies work—for example, Windows Server, Exchange Server, Windows Azure, and SharePoint Server 2013—this is the Windows Store app for you.

Enjoy! Kevin

Hi, we’re Martin McClean and Brian Lich from the Windows Server Information Experience team.

Server Posterpedia is a Windows Store app designed for Windows 8 and Windows RT that brings graphical content together with content from TechNet and MSDN. It enables you to learn about Microsoft technologies by providing deep links to Microsoft content from within a Windows Store app. Today we’re pleased to announce that Server Posterpedia v2 is available in the Windows Store. The following features are available in version 2:

• Image hotspots that allow you to get content specific to a part of the poster (new).
• Semantic zoom that enables easy navigation of the different groups (new).
• A full-screen viewing mode without the chrome and hotspots (new).
• The ability to share a link to a poster through email (new).
• App bar buttons specific to each poster.
• Technical content for Hyper-V, Active Directory, Remote Desktop Services, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008, Exchange Server 2010, Exchange Server 2007, SharePoint Server 2010, Windows Azure, SQL Server, Lync Server 2010, and Office 2013.

Server Posterpedia is updated frequently with new content, so be sure to download any app updates when you’re notified.

If you’re running Windows 8, you can get this app from the Windows Store:
https://aka.ms/sposterpedia

If you’re not running Windows 8 yet, check out this video that illustrates the app’s features and functionality:
https://aka.ms/sposterpediavid

The post Server Posterpedia v2 available in the Windows Store! 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.

Read Satya’s full post.

The post Windows Server 2012 is here — and so is the Cloud OS 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.

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