I’m incredibly excited that this morning at our Ignite conference in Atlanta we launched the newest release of our server operating system – Windows Server 2016! Now that we’re ready to share it with the world, I want to take a moment to thank our customers who helped shape this exciting release. Windows Server 2016 is jam-packed with innovation and customer response has been overwhelming, with more than half a million devices running our final Technical Preview which we released five months ago. These customers range from large global enterprises to private cloud hosters to organizations of every size from every corner of the globe.
I’m about to lose control and I think I like it…
Why is Erin so exited? Or is is just the admins fear to lose control?
typical marketing. project managers are always excited to release something.
But he’s ‘incredibly excited’ as are we all. Especially excited at the privilege of paying per core not per processor.
Edited 2016-09-27 12:04 UTC
No, he is not, but she is!
Aaron = male
Erin = female
Thanks,
Aaron
Except for the couple of guys I’ve known named Erin.
I also have known a few female Aarons. Can’t really tell gender from name these days. But luckily, it usually doesn’t matter.
.
Edited 2016-09-27 11:06 UTC
Server 2012 was enough trauma. Now we have something even crazier, no doubt with all of Windows 10’s house of cards components on top of the stack of tilting blocks that Windows Server already is? There’s a word comes to my mind, and it begins with cluster.
If you’re building something new .. why would you use MS Server? Can’t think of valid reasons. If your organisation has it entrenched .. you start to take a new path .. one project at a time. You can’t keep saying “but we have ms server” .. forever.
If you’re updating to keep in supported versions you should be looking to get off it. That means not locking yourself inner new features. But instead hanging on using current features until your replacement is ready (phased).
So why is Server 2016 anyone’s future strategic choice? Genuinely interested.
PS interesting that almost zero startups and recent-startups-gone-big use MS Office, SharePoint, Server, SQL, etc etx
I wouldn’t pick it for building something new. However if I am installing pre-made stuff. Or have a Microsoft focused developer staff. It may make sense to stick with it. It isn’t as good as other alternatives but it doesn’t suck soo much either.
Until something doesn’t work. It’s hell to troubleshoot. The error codes aren’t even documented sometimes, and that’s when it bothers to give you an error code at all. When it works, it works well. When it doesn’t though, you’ll lose a lot of hair.
theTSF,
“We hear you loud and clear, we just don’t give a f*ck” – microsoft.
Is there any reason to do this, other than spite?
Active Directory.
The only problem is once you’ve deployed a couple of AD servers, you find you need a couple of other servers; System Center, MS-SQL, maybe a bastion for RDP & Powershell…and it grows.
The future of server computing is cloud computing, that much is clear and Microsoft is positioning themselves for that.
But there is no special reason not to improve your in house data centers at this moment.
But you are right in a general sense. If you would be setting up a new server environment it probably makes much more sense to get SharePoint Online or a “Dynamics 365” subscription than to setup your own servers for this. Those online service will probably also be running on the Azure version of Server 2016 though.
I don’t get it. Why do they put a tablet UI on a server. And if it like 2012. Lets put that power off button next to the search. And have the icons looks similar.
<insert_default_blame_sinofsky_for_windows_8_and_especially_2012 />
Nobody understood that. It was just a bad consequence of server and client sharing the same core AND UI. Just like 8.1 it was mostly fixed in 2012R2 but I still dislike the new server manager.
Then again, I mostly interact with all my servers from 1 central management server and the other servers are GUI-less core versions (smaller, lighter, less patching)
… have you guys any idea what’s in WS 2016 ?
Licensing is a mess, as usual but no more than other players.
Some of us do, because in the original article there are two links and some of us clicked on that.
Summary: Better support for very small and efficient servers and virtualization (nanoserver, containers) but also for very large servers (cloud, azure, datacenter)
and of course the usuals: faster, more secure, more modern, easier to use, longer supported, more features, improved features
Right but there’s much more.
* lots of improvements in the virtualization area, including a WHOLE stack or technologies to virtualize (software-defined) basically any datacenter service. Storage, networking&routing and more;
* a huge set of technologies aimed at simplifying automation (for ex. Nano, extended Powershell and more);
* ReFS now ready for prime-time (this alone is huge for multi-TBs deployments);
* a complete stack of security enhancements for both customers and providers (robustness against common attack vectors, JEA just-enough-administration, shielded VMs, enhancements for VM security and I could go on for hours);
* lots of improvements in the storage area that, alone, could let you save huge sums of money and kick those H/W vendors and their expensive contracts out the door: storage spaces direct (S2D) for resiliency, storage replicas (sync and async), stretched clusters, ReFS with performance improvements and so on. Better deduplication support, for example, ready to be used in various scenarios;
* vastly improved Linux support for VMs;
* Windows containers, compatible with Docker. WS 2016 has both classic containers (running on the same machine a la Docker) but also Hyper-V containers to provide maximum isolation between them, suitable to be provided as a service to service provider customers;
* highly-optimized Windows Defender service suitable to run on servers;
And more. PLUS, the usual scalability, performance and security improvements.
Understand that this is so huge that Microsoft was able to actually RISE the costs of Windows Server in a context of economic downturn AND when its main competitor is actually FREE. Go figure…
Plus Microsoft has a LOT of free technologies to use on top of new Windows Server.
And what about releasing .NET, SQL Server and Powershell for Linux ? Microsoft is going to use cheap Linux installations as a foundation for its technologies.
No wonder Erin is so excited…
Having said that, on the other hand, licensing is a mess (actually rising pricing tag for WS, which nobody felt was needed), Microsoft has decided to provide access to some key technologies through H/W vendors (Azure Stack) probably to make them swallow the pill of its software-defined technologies and it is tying Windows Server to Azure too much. So it’s not a bed of roses but anyway if you are experienced, Windows Server 2016 is HUGE.
Powershell for Linux is not something to be terribly excited for. Its probably only useful for dealing with MS stuff from linux. Powershell has historically aliased Bash commands to the closest powershell equivalent. Except… well, They don’t really take the same arguments and they don’t work the same.
So if you are okay with a bunch of familiar bash commands doing the wrong things if used, then its fine, I guess.
If you say so…
I don’t want to start a fight about Powershell vs Bash. I only say I know tons of Linux admins that loved Powershell and long considered it “the only or most important thing in Windows I would like to use on Linux”.
My take on Power Shell: it’s awesome for scripting but clearly not designed to be used as an interactive command-line. The command structure just doesn’t lend itself well to on-the-fly interactive use. It’s a bit like using a php interpreter as your main CLI; you can do it, but it’ll be painful.
To be honest, I find Powershell to be much more elegant and easier to use than Bash. Plus, of course, it has many more functionalities and it is coherent while you need to rely on external commands in Bash.
And when there’s something you cannot do directly in PS (basically, when there’s no ready-made cmdlet and you cannot write your own), you can simply delegate the task to .NET and import .NET as a huge “plugin” to PS.
However that’s understandable as PS has been design for modern computing and a much later time than Bash itself so Microsoft was simply able to put all features and concepts that we learned through times into PS.
Yeah, there is a subset of users that really want shells to be scripting languages. If you do, then powershell has some real advantages over others. I don’t. I like my shells dumb shells and my scripting languages powerful scripting languages.
https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/pull/1901
I’m not really debating powersell vs bash either.
I’m warning people of the alias of bash commands. It doesn’t do what you would expect the real commands to do. If you’re okay with that, then its a not bad for some use cases.
I understand your point.
All in all, it doesn’t seem a huge problem to me but other people and Linux admins might disagree.
TBPrince,
I experience this same thing when I switch from GNU tools to busybox, for example. I’ll find myself trying to use features from one side that aren’t supported on the other side.
I’d guess it doesn’t matter at all to an MS user who is learning to use the tools without prior experience. Such a user probably won’t even notice anything different (at least until trying to use a real linux shell). Current linux users are more likely to be more frustrated by differences.
Alfman,
you’re right, for sure. However, I think that when you’re learning new stuff, you should also put yourself in a mindset that helps to deal with and overcome difficulties.
No doubt that adding Unix aliases to Powershell has been a bad decision, if we think about that now, but Microsoft only wanted to help (i.e. shortcut) the burden for Unix admins using Windows Server and it didn’t want to port PS to Linux. Now it is too late to change things.
Anyway I think that, if you want to learn new things, you have to take the pain of dealing with new problems.
After all, no-one forces Unix admins to use Powershell if they don’t want. 🙂
TBPrince,
That’s true if you are deciding for yourself. However as is often the case in business, IT decisions are often made to oblige someone else. I still support clients running DOS systems
Mostly I see it used to run corporate Domains. Linux won’t take over in this area until there’s a decent GUI for SAMBA 4 that always works as well as for OpenChange, that’s for both management and installation. A web UI installed by default would be nice too. I actually like the idea of someone making a GTK+ based GUI, and then using GTK’s Broadway backend to make it a web enabled GUI. I think that would be a great way to get SAMBA 4 web enabled.
Edited 2016-09-27 21:34 UTC
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Edited 2016-09-27 21:42 UTC
oops wrong posting.
Fantastic post I like it. Keep it up
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Edited 2016-09-28 07:40 UTC