At its Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft confirmed that the final version of Windows Server 2012 is set for September and the company plans to target VMware customers.
Microsofts Windows
Server 2012 will be released to manufacturers sometime in August and become
generally available for sale in September, the company announced July 10. The
software giant also detailed its plans to lure customers to its Hyper-V
virtualization platform and away from industry leader VMware.
On the
second day of its Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto, Microsoft shared
with an audience of about 16,000 Microsoft partners the performance
improvements in Windows Server 2012 that will manage on-premise, cloud and
hybrid environments for enterprises. Collectively, Windows Server 2012, its
cloud counterpart Windows Azure and Microsoft System Center for managing the
entire system, make up the Microsoft Cloud OS, said Satya
Nadella, president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft.
Microsoft
also announced a community technology preview of a trio of hosting services
that will make it possible for service providers to offer their customers
turnkey cloud services, including highly scalable Web site and virtual machine
hosting with an extensible self-service portal experience. These services,
recently made available on Windows Azure, will now be added to Windows Server
2012, Nadella said.
The company
also touted specific performance enhancements in Windows Server, including
benchmarks that best those of
rival
VMware. Windows Server 2012 will support
up to 320 logical processors per server, up to 4 terabytes of memory per server
and up to 64 virtual processors per virtual machine, said Jeff Woolsey, senior
program manager for Windows Server Virtualization at Microsoft.
During a live demonstration, Woolsey said that VMware says they can deliver a
maximum of 300,000 input/output instructions per second (I/Os) from a single
virtual machine, but that Microsoft, with Windows Server 2012, can deliver more
than 1 million I/Os.
Thats over
three times VMware and, folks, Im just getting warmed up, said Woolsey.
The new
server OS also adds a feature Woolsey called offloaded data transfer (ODX)
for faster backups to storage. He tried
to move a 10GB file to storage without ODX and noted how network utilization
spiked because of the load. With ODX on, the file was backed up to storage in
about 10 seconds.
This type
of performance is unheard of ¦ and it makes Server 2012 a no-brainer for cloud
storage, Woolsey concluded.
Microsoft
made another dig at VMware by unveiling a Switch to Hyper-V program.
Virtualization is essential to enable cloud computing, and VMware has been the
leader in virtualization technology, though Microsoft has been challenging it
with its Hyper-V hypervisor and related technology. But switching
virtualization vendors is a complicated task because of all the configuration
issues involved. With the Switch to Hyper-V program youll get tools,
resources and guidance to take the risk out of these migrations, said Nadella.
He then
touted a couple of successful customer conversions to Hyper-V. Fyrsoft, an
enterprise consulting services provider, was able to move Pella, a maker of
windows and doors typically seen in residential construction, from VMware to
Hyper-V, while Microsoft partner Avanade, a technology managed-services
provider, successfully migrated Unilever, a global consumer products company,
to Hyper-V.
Of Windows
Server 2012, Nadella said there have already been more than 500,000 downloads
of the release candidate of the OS and that 250 customers are already trying it
out, some of them in production. And in true eat your own dog food fashion,
he said
the Microsoft Bing search engine runs on Windows
Server 2012.
The
Worldwide Partner Conference began July 9 with news that the
Windows
8 operating system for desktops, laptops and tablet computers, would be
released to manufacturing the first week in August and would be generally
available by the end of October.
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