Windows Server 2012 Essentials Download. Small business looking to guarantee the security of their business information can seek assistance from Windows Server 2012 Essentials. It can work with up to 25 users and 50 gadgets without experiencing any trouble. Windows Server 2012 R2 Summary: Windows Server 2012 R2 main objective is to deal with the network complexity and solve storage related problems. Now Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials can be installed on physical, virtual or on the domain of member server.
. Start date: October 30, 2012. Mainstream support: Ended October 9, 2018.
Extended support: Until October 10, 2023 Windows Server 2012, codenamed 'Windows Server 8', is the fifth release of. It is the server version of and succeeds. Two pre-release versions, a and a, were released during development.
The software was generally available to customers starting on September 4, 2012. Unlike its predecessor, Windows Server 2012 has no support for -based computers, and has four editions. Various features were added or improved over Windows Server 2008 R2 (with many placing an emphasis on ), such as an updated version of, an role, a new version of, and, a new. Windows Server 2012 received generally good reviews in spite of having included the same controversial -based user interface seen in Windows 8, which includes the 'Charms Bar' for quick access to settings in the desktop environment. Contents. History Windows Server 2012, codenamed 'Windows Server 8', is the fifth release of family of operating systems developed concurrently with. It was not until April 17, 2012 that the company announced that the final product name would be 'Windows Server 2012'.
Microsoft introduced Windows Server 2012 and its in the conference on September 9, 2011. However, unlike Windows 8, the developer preview of Windows Server 2012 was only made available to subscribers. It included a (GUI) based on and a new Server Manager, a graphical application used for server management. On February 16, 2012, Microsoft released an update for developer preview build that extended its expiry date from April 8, 2012 to January 15, 2013. Before Windows Server 2012 was finalized, two test were made public. A public of Windows Server 2012 was released along with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview on February 29, 2012.
The of Windows Server 2012 was released on May 31, 2012, along with the Windows 8 Release Preview. The product was on August 1, 2012 and became on September 4, 2012. However, not all were released at the same time. Windows Server 2012 Essentials was released to manufacturing on October 9, 2012 and was made generally available on November 1, 2012. As of September 23, 2012, all students subscribed to program can download Windows Server 2012 Standard or Datacenter free of charge.
Features. See also: Installation options Unlike its predecessor, Windows Server 2012 can switch between ' and 'Server with a ' installation options without a full reinstallation. Server Core – an option with a command-line interface only – is now the recommended configuration. There is also a third installation option that allows some GUI elements such as and Server Manager to run, but without the normal desktop, or default programs like.
User interface Server Manager has been redesigned with an emphasis on easing management of multiple servers. The operating system, like Windows 8, uses the Metro-based unless installed in Server Core mode.
Is available in this version of Windows but is not installed by default. In this version has over 2300 commandlets, compared to around 200 in Windows Server 2008 R2. Task Manager. Main article: Windows Server 2012 includes a new version of together with the old version. In the new version the tabs are hidden by default, showing applications only. In the new Processes tab, the processes are displayed in varying shades of yellow, with darker shades representing heavier resource use.
It lists application names and status, as well as, and utilization. The process information found in the older versions are now moved to the new Details tab. The Performance tab shows 'CPU', 'Memory', 'Disk', 'Wi-Fi' and 'Ethernet' graphs. Unlike the Windows 8 version of Task Manager (which looks similar), the 'Disk' activity graph is not enabled by default. The CPU tab no longer displays individual graphs for every logical processor on the system by default, although that remains an option. Additionally, it can display data for each (NUMA) node. When displaying data for each logical processor for machines with more than 64 logical processors, the CPU tab now displays simple utilization percentages on heat-mapping tiles.
The color used for these heat maps is blue, with darker shades again indicating heavier utilization. Hovering the cursor over any logical processor's data now shows the NUMA node of that processor and its ID, if applicable. Additionally, a new Startup tab has been added that lists startup applications, however this tab does not exist in Windows Server 2012.
The new task manager recognizes when a app has the 'Suspended' status. IP address management (IPAM) Windows Server 2012 has an role for discovering, monitoring, auditing, and managing the space used on a corporate network. The IPAM is used for the management and monitoring of (DNS) and (DHCP) servers. Both and are fully supported. Active Directory Windows Server 2012 has a number of changes to from the version shipped with Windows Server 2008 R2. The Active Directory Domain Services installation wizard has been replaced by a new section in Server Manager, and a GUI has been added to the Active Directory Recycle Bin. Multiple password policies can be set in the same domain.
Active Directory in Windows Server 2012 is now aware of any changes resulting from virtualization, and virtualized domain controllers can be safely cloned. Upgrades of the domain functional level to Windows Server 2012 are simplified; it can be performed entirely in Server Manager.
Active Directory Federation Services is no longer required to be downloaded when installed as a role, and claims which can be used by the Active Directory Federation Services have been introduced into the Kerberos token. Windows Powershell commands used by Active Directory Administrative Center can be viewed in a 'Powershell History Viewer'. Hyper-V Windows Server 2012, along with Windows 8, includes a new version of, as presented at the Microsoft BUILD event. Many new features have been added to Hyper-V, including network virtualization, multi-tenancy, storage resource pools, cross-premises connectivity, and cloud backup. Additionally, many of the former restrictions on resource consumption have been greatly lifted.
Each virtual machine in this version of Hyper-V can access up to 64 virtual processors, up to 1 terabyte of memory, and up to 64 terabytes of virtual disk space per virtual hard disk (using a new.vhdx format). Up to 1024 virtual machines can be active per host, and up to 8000 can be active per failover cluster. Is a required processor feature for Hyper-V on Windows 8, while for Windows Server 2012 it is only required for the supplementary role. Main article: Resilient File System (ReFS), codenamed 'Protogon', is a new in Windows Server 2012 initially intended for that improves on in some respects.
Major new features of ReFS include: Improved reliability for on-disk structures ReFS uses for all on-disk structures including metadata and file data. Metadata and file data are organized into tables similar to a. The file size, number of files in a, total volume size and number of folders in a volume are limited by 64-bit numbers; as a result ReFS supports a maximum file size of 16, a maximum of 18.4 × 10 18 folders and a maximum volume size of 1 (with 64 KB ) which allows large scalability with no practical limits on file and folder size (hardware restrictions still apply).
Free space is counted by a hierarchical allocator which includes three separate tables for large, medium, and small chunks. File names and file paths are each limited to a 32 KB text string. Built-in resilience ReFS employs an update strategy for metadata, which allocates new chunks for every update transaction and uses large IO batches. All ReFS metadata has built-in 64-bit checksums which are stored independently.
The file data can have an optional checksum in a separate 'integrity ', in which case the file update strategy also implements allocation-on-write; this is controlled by a new 'integrity' attribute applicable to both files and directories. If nevertheless file data or metadata becomes corrupt, the file can be deleted without taking the whole volume offline. As a result of built-in resiliency, administrators do not need to periodically run error-checking tools such as when using ReFS. Compatibility with existing APIs and technologies ReFS does not require new system APIs and most file system filters continue to work with ReFS volumes. ReFS supports many existing Windows and NTFS features such as encryption, change notifications,. ReFS seamlessly integrates with, a layer that allows data mirroring and striping, as well as sharing storage pools between machines. ReFS resiliency features enhance the mirroring feature provided by Storage Spaces and can detect whether any mirrored copies of files become corrupt using background process, which periodically reads all mirror copies and verifies their checksums then replaces bad copies with good ones.
Some NTFS features are not supported in ReFS, including,. Are supported. Support for is not implemented in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, though it was later added in Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2. ReFS does not itself offer. Dynamic disks with mirrored or striped volumes are replaced with mirrored or striped storage pools provided by Storage Spaces. In Windows Server 2012, automated error-correction with integrity streams is only supported on mirrored spaces; automatic recovery on parity spaces was added in Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2.
Booting from ReFS is not supported either. IIS 8.0 Windows Server 2012 includes version 8.0 of (IIS).
The new version contains new features such as, CPU usage caps for particular websites, centralized management of, support and improved support for NUMA, but few other substantial changes were made. Scalability Windows Server 2012 supports the following maximum hardware specifications. Windows Server 2012 improves over its predecessor Windows Server 2008 R2: Specification Windows Server 2012 Windows Server 2008 R2 64 64 when is disabled 640 256 Logical processors when Hyper-V is enabled 320 64 4 2 TB Failover cluster nodes (in any single cluster) 64 16 System requirements Minimum system requirements for Windows Server 2012 1.4 GHz, 512 MB Free 32 GB (more if there is at least 16 GB of RAM) Windows Server 2012 runs only on processors.
Unlike its predecessor, Windows Server 2012 does not support. Upgrades from Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are supported, although upgrades from prior releases are not.
Editions Windows Server 2012 has four editions: Foundation, Essentials, Standard and Datacenter. Applies to Windows Server 2008 R2 and 2012 Datacenter and Windows Server 2012 Standard only.
Other editions support less. Each virtualized partition, including the host itself, can use up to 64 processors. ^ Each license of Windows Server 2012 Standard or Datacenter allows up to two processor chips. Each license of Windows Server 2012 Standard allows up to two virtual instances of Windows Server 2012 Standard on that physical server. If more virtual instances of Windows Server 2012 Standard are needed, each additional license of Windows Server 2012 allows up to two more virtual instances of Windows Server 2012 Standard, even though the physical server itself may have sufficient licenses for its processor chip count. Because Windows Server 2012 Datacenter has no limit on the number of virtual instances per licensed server, only enough licenses for the physical server are needed for any number of virtual instances of Windows Server 2012 Datacenter.
If the number of processor chips or virtual instances is an odd number, the number of licenses required is the same as the next even number. For example, a single-processor-chip server would still require 1 license, the same as if the server were two-processor-chip and a five-processor-chip server would require 3 licenses, the same as if the server were six-processor-chip, and if 15 virtual instances of Windows Server 2012 Standard are needed on one server, 8 licenses of Windows Server 2012, which can cover up to 16 virtual instances, are needed (assuming, in this example, that the processor chip count does not exceed 16). ^ For the Standard and Datacenter editions, each user or device accessing the software must have a (CAL) assigned (either per-user or per-device), so there may be no more simultaneous users than the number of client-access licenses, except up to 2 simultaneous users purely to administer the server software, or for running virtualization or web workloads. Remote Desktop Services requires an additional CAL separate from the aforementioned CAL. ^ If the number of physical processors in a particular server is under 64, the limit is determined by the quantity of licenses assigned to that server. In that case, the number of physical processors cannot exceed twice the number of licenses assigned to the server. References.
Microsoft Support. January 2012. Retrieved October 10, 2012. ^ Foley, Mary Jo (April 17, 2012). Retrieved April 17, 2012. ^ Snover, Jeffrey (August 1, 2012).
Windows Server Blog. Retrieved January 29, 2013. ^ Foley, Mary Jo (April 5, 2010). Retrieved January 1, 2012.
^ Savill, John (February 29, 2012). Retrieved February 29, 2012. ^ Snover, Jeffrey (April 24, 2012). Windows Server Blog. Retrieved January 21, 2013.
Laing, Bill (September 9, 2011). Server & Cloud Blog. Retrieved January 23, 2013. SoftNews SRL.
September 14, 2011. Retrieved January 25, 2013. ^ Bisson, Simon (September 14, 2011). Retrieved January 1, 2012. Arghire, Ionut (February 18, 2012). SoftNews SRL. Retrieved July 15, 2013.
Snover, Jeffrey. Windows Server Blog! Retrieved January 25, 2013. Windows Server Blog! Retrieved January 25, 2013. Retrieved January 25, 2013.
Callaham, John (September 9, 2011). Retrieved January 21, 2013. Wilhelm, Alex (September 9, 2011). The Next Web. Retrieved January 1, 2012.
Retrieved January 30, 2014. Thurott, Paul (November 2, 2011).
Paul Thurott's Supersite for Windows. Retrieved January 1, 2012. Williams, Mike; Hanson, Matt (October 25, 2012). Future Publishing.
Retrieved January 22, 2013. Haveson, Ryan (October 13, 2011)., ed. Building Windows 8. Retrieved January 31, 2013. Building Windows 8. Retrieved October 29, 2011.
Retrieved October 29, 2011. Hu, Aaron. Retrieved October 14, 2012. The Startup tab is not present on Windows Server 2012. It is only on Windows 8. February 29, 2012. Retrieved January 21, 2013.
Shields, Greg (July 3, 2012). Redmond magazine. 1105 Redmond Media. Retrieved January 21, 2013. Sherif Mahmoud, Tamer (May 29, 2012). Team blog of MCS @ Middle East and Africa. Retrieved January 21, 2013.
Bruzzese, J. Peter (October 26, 2011). Retrieved January 1, 2012. Deuby, Sean (September 14, 2011). Retrieved July 16, 2013. Herrmann, Max; Laing, Bill; Vecchiet, Manlio; Neil, Mike (September 14, 2011). Retrieved February 2, 2013.: Microsoft.
September 13–16, 2011. Retrieved February 2, 2013. Retrieved October 5, 2012. ^ Savill, John (October 28, 2011). Retrieved November 5, 2011. Garg, Pankaj; Tan, See-Mong (September 14, 2011).
Retrieved January 22, 2013. Savil, John (October 21, 2011). Retrieved November 5, 2011.
Lucas, Martin (January 1, 2013). Ask Premier Field Engineering (PFE) Platforms. Retrieved January 20, 2013. ^ Foley, Mary Jo (January 16, 2012). Retrieved January 21, 2013. ^ Verma, Surendra (January 16, 2012)., ed.
Building Windows 8. Retrieved January 20, 2013. Meyer, David (January 17, 2012). Retrieved January 20, 2013. November 8, 2012. Retrieved January 21, 2013.
Nagar, Rajeev (January 5, 2012)., ed. Building Windows 8. Retrieved January 18, 2013. January 2, 2013.
Retrieved March 31, 2013. Retrieved March 31, 2013.
29 February 2012. Retrieved 25 December 2013. Mackie, Kurt.
Redmond magazine. 1105 Redmond Media. Retrieved August 17, 2012. Anderson, Tim (September 4, 2012). Retrieved January 21, 2013.
^ Seldam, Matthijs ten (October 13, 2012). Matthijs's blog. Retrieved October 14, 2012.
March 28, 2013. Retrieved April 1, 2013.
System requirements. Retrieved June 10, 2012.
Foley, Mary Jo (July 5, 2012). Retrieved July 5, 2012. Retrieved December 8, 2015. Retrieved July 5, 2012. Archived from (PDF) on July 22, 2012.
Retrieved 8 December 2015. Retrieved November 4, 2012.
^ Bisson, Simon (September 13, 2012). Retrieved January 19, 2013. ^ Anderson, Tim (September 5, 2012). Situation Publishing. Retrieved January 19, 2013. Ferrill, Paul (October 3, 2012). Retrieved January 19, 2013.
Rist, Oliver (June 27, 2012). Retrieved January 19, 2013. Otey, Michael (July 25, 2012). Retrieved January 19, 2013. Lui, Spandas (September 12, 2012). Retrieved January 21, 2013.
Ferrill, Paul (December 16, 2012). Retrieved January 20, 2013. Anderson, Tim (December 21, 2012). Retrieved January 20, 2013.
Thurott, Paul (October 2, 2012). Retrieved January 20, 2013.
Resseler, Mike (August 2013). Retrieved September 3, 2013. Further reading. Stanek, William (2013). Windows Server 2012 Inside Out.
Stanek, William (2014). Windows Server 2012 R2 Inside Out Volume 1: Configuration, Storage, & Essentials. Stanek, William (2014).
Windows Server 2012 R2 Inside Out Volume 2: Services, Security, & Infrastructure. External links Wikiversity has learning resources about. on. on.
on.
What an exciting time to be part of the Windows Server team! Earlier this week we announced the RTM and general availability of Windows Server 2012 in conjunction with the Windows 8 team’s announcement of their dates.
Since then we’ve seen a steady stream of exciting news coming out of Toronto where the 2012 World Wide Partner Conference is being held. Today I’m happy to host Joe Nalewabau from the Windows Server Essentials team to make yet another exciting announcement. By now you should be picking up on some reoccurring themes that keep showing up in these blogs:. 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. Cheers– Jeffrey Hi, I’m Joe Nalewabau, Group Program Manager on the Windows Server Essentials team, and today I’m excited to introduce the beta for (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.
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, 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:. On-Premises. Essentials 2012 will integrate with an on-premises Exchange server running on a second server, which can be either physical or virtual. Office 365. If customers have an Office 365 account they can choose to use this for their email. 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:. 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.
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.