Microsoft Previews Next Windows Server

Single day after Microsoft launched the opening beta of the close generation of its Windows background in operation scheme, Windows 8, the companionship previewed the adjacent version of its server OS, Windows Server 8.

"This is one of our broadest, deepest releases," said Satya Nadella, Microsoft's president for server and tools, at the Microsoft Build conference, being held this hebdomad in Anaheim, California.

The ship's company did not offer a final sackin date for the operative system, which will replace the modern adaptation of the Atomic number 76, Windows Server 2008.

Wednesday's keynote session discussing Windows Waiter 8 had a storm visitor at the end: Microsoft Chief executive officer Steve Ballmer.

Nadella stressed how this rendering of the OS would be more scalable than old iterations.

The chopine "is truly multi-tenant," Nadella said. "We've done a major vamp of how you can provision your compute, storage and meshwork in support of your different application workloads."

The software has borrowed technologies industrial when the company built its Azure cloud overhaul, Nadella noted. "We nates now have little clusters with high availability, soh you Don River't motive to be a large-scale supplier to have high availability," Nadella aforementioned.

Three starring new features were demonstrated during the presentation: storage array management, virtual unenviable disk live migration and the ability to transfer data using multiple network cards in a single server.

In a novel feature called Computer storage Spaces, administrators butt manage multiple drives connected by SAS (Serial Betrothed SCSI) without the need for additive storage management software package. Microsoft political platform manager Bryon Surace showed how a machine could pool 16 separate indulgent drives as a single storage pool, from which multiple virtual drives can then personify partitioned.

"Traditionally, it has required a specialized skillset to deploy and manage storage arrays," Surace same. With Windows Server 8, "You can just attach a bunch of disks to Windows and have them all managed and deployed right thither."

The memory board applied science utilizes the Samba SMB 2.2 protocol.

Surace also incontestible how a server could use multiple network connections to boost bandwidth. Atomic number 2 showed how a single gigabit NIC (network user interface controller) provided a characteristic throughput of about 100 megabytes per arcsecond. He then showed the throughput of a server with quaternion squealing-speed NICs utilizing RDMA (Remote Direct Remembering Access). In this case, the throughput exceeded 2 gigabytes per endorse.

"With Windows Server 8, we can use multiple NICS at the same time to help improve throughput and brea tolerance," Surace said. Such capabilities were "previously usable exclusive for superior computing," Surace same.

On the virtualization front, Surace showed off a new feature named elastic migration, in which the virtual fixed disk of a VM (essential machine) could make up moved from one storage localisation to another, even as a imitate of the VM was running.

Windows Waiter 8 is expected to glucinium a major revision of the Atomic number 76. Unusual features that Microsoft has demonstrated elsewhere let in a significantly revamped PowerShell and an upgraded Hyper-V virtualization hypervisor.

Microsoft plans to reveal more Windows Server 8 features at Figure this week.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology break news for The IDG News Service. Come after Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-postal service address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com