Windows Server 2012 Features

Windows Server 2012 is designed for the cloud from the ground up and provides a foundation for building both public and private cloud solutions to enable businesses to take advantage of the many benefits of cloud computing.

Here is the Some Excellent Features of Server 2012:-

Windows Server 2012 also allows you to live migrate VMs between stand-alone Hyper-V hosts without the use of any shared storage. This scenario is also known as Live Migration without Infrastructure (or Shared Nothing Live Migration), and the only requirements are

that the two hosts must belong to the same Active Directory domain and that they must be using processors from the same manufacturer (all AMD or all Intel, for instance). When Live Migration without infrastructure is performed, the entire VM is moved from the first host to the second with no perceived downtime.

 

Performing Live Migration

Live Migration can be performed from the GUI or using PowerShell, but first you need to enable Live Migration functionality on your host machines. This can be done by using the Hyper-V console to open the Hyper-V Settings, as shown in Figure

VM priority

Efficient automatic management of clustered VMs and other clustered roles is now possible in Windows Server 2012 by assigning a relative priority to each VM in the cluster. Once this has been configured, the cluster will then automatically manage the VM or other clustered role based on its assigned priority.

Four possible priorities can be assigned to a clustered VM or clustered role:

■ High

■ Medium (the default)

■ Low

■ No Auto Start

Assigning priorities to clustered VMs or other clustered roles lets you control both the start order and placement of each VM or other role in the cluster. For example, VMs that have higher priority are started before those having lower priority. The benefit of this is to allow you to ensure that the most important VMs are started first and are running before other VMs are started. In addition, support for preemption is included so that low-priority VMs can be automatically shut down in order to free up resources so that higher-priority VMs can successfully start. And although Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 now supports concurrent Live Migrations, the order in which VMs queued for Live Migration but not yet migrated can also be determined on the basis of priority.

VMs that have higher priority are also placed on appropriate nodes before VMs with lower priority. This means, for example, that VMs can be placed on the nodes that have the best available memory resources, with memory requirements being evaluated on a per-VM basis. The result is enhanced failover placement, and this capability is also Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA)–aware.

Next Figure shows Fail-over Cluster Manager being used to manage a two-node cluster that has two cluster roles running on it: a scale-out file server and a VM. Right-clicking the clustered VM and selecting Change Start-up Priority allows you to change the priority of the VM from its default Medium setting to High.

 Virtual machine monitoring

Ensuring high availability of services running in clustered VMs is important because service interruptions can lead to loss of user productivity and customer dissatisfaction. A new capability of Fail-over Cluster Manager in Windows Server 2012 is the ability to monitor the health of clustered VMs by determining whether business-critical services are running within VMs running in clustered environments. By enabling the host to recover from service failures in the guest, the cluster service in the host can take remedial action when necessary in order to ensure greater uptime for services your users or customers need. You enable this functionality by right-clicking the clustered VM and selecting Configure Monitoring from the More Actions menu item, as shown here:

(Copycat from MS Book.).