VT Technology Blog: May 2015

Microsoft announced release of Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview at Ignite conference in Chicago on May 4.

The second preview includes Nano Server, support for rolling upgrades for Hyper-V and Storage Clusters, Storage Replica and other improvements.

Windows Server / Hyper-V Container and Azure Stack functionalities are not included in TP 2 and expected to be available in the next TP coming this summer.

Windows Server 2016 TP download link

Hyper-V Server TP download link

What's new in Windows Server 2016 TP :

Compute and Virtualization: Simplified upgrades, new installment options, and increased resilience, helping you ensure the stability of the infrastructure without limiting agility.

Rolling upgrades for Hyper-V and scale-out file server clusters for faster adoption of new operating systems
Functionality for hot add and remove memory and NIC, reducing downtime
Virtual machine compute resiliency, so that virtual machines continue running even if the compute cluster fabric service fails
Nano Server, a deeply refactored version of Windows Server with a small footprint and remotely managed installation, optimized for the cloud and a DevOps workflow

Networking: Continued investment to make networking as flexible and cost-effective as possible while ensuring high performance.

Converged NIC across tenant and RDMA traffic to optimize costs, enabling high performance and network fault tolerance with only 2 NICs instead of 4
PacketDirect on 40G to optimize performance

Storage: Expanding capabilities in software-defined storage with an emphasis on resilience, reduced cost, and increased control.

Virtual Machine Storage Path resiliency, enabling virtual machines to pause and restart gracefully in response to either transient or permanent storage path failures
Storage Spaces Direct to enable aggregation of Storage Spaces across multiple servers, pushing the cost of storage down while allowing for increased scale out
Storage quality of service (QoS) for more control and predictable performance
Storage Replica, giving you synchronous storage replication for affordable business continuity and disaster recovery strategies

Security and Assurance: Protecting against today’s threats with a “zero-trust” approach to security that is rooted in the hardware.

New Host Guardian Service, part of a trust and isolation boundary between the cloud infrastructure and guest OS layers
Just Enough Administration to reduce the risk of security breaches by allowing users to perform only specific tasks

Management: Ongoing advances to simplify server management and increase consistency in approach.

PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) for easier, consistent and faster deployment and updates.
PowerShell Package Manager for unified package management and deployment
Windows Management Framework 5.0 April Preview and DSC Resource Kit (available online simultaneously with TP2)

And much more, including new features for IIS, RDS, and AD such as:

Conditional access control in AD FS, allows requiring a device compliant with policies to access resources
Support for application authentication with OpenID Connect and OAuth, making it easier to build mobile enterprise applications
Full OpenGL support with RDS for VDI scenarios
Server-side support for HTTP/2 including header compression, connection multiplexing and server push.

So what’s the next step? Check out the Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 2 here, and start learning more about what’s new and notable.