Windows Server 2019 is a highly anticipated release from Microsoft that takes all aspects of the enterprise datacenter to the next level. Microsoft is committed to supporting both hybrid and native cloud environments. Windows Server 2019 contains features and functionality that allow organizations that are in all stages of cloud or cloud migrations to utilize the latest and greatest features and functionality to support their various deployments.
Just this week at Microsoft’s Ignite conference, Microsoft announced major news regarding Windows Server 2019 and its availability as well as a recap of features and functionality that can be expected to ship with the latest Windows Server operating system.
Let’s take a look at Windows Server 2019 GA Release Announced and New Features.
Windows Server 2019 GA Availability Announced
Microsoft’s Ignite conference this year was packed full of announcements and new product highlights. Among those was the announcement of the Windows Server 2019 GA Availability. Microsoft made known this week that Windows Server 2019 will be available for download beginning in October of this year, which at the time of this writing is only a few days away. With all the betas and preview releases of Windows Server 2019 that have come and gone this year, it is great to see Microsoft place a hard drop date of the general availability release of the next generation operating system. Microsoft has directed that customers will be able to see when the download is available by keeping an eye on the official Microsoft blog channels that will detail this information once it is made available.
Windows Server 2019 GA New Features
There are so many new or enhanced features to be found in Windows Server 2019 GA. Microsoft has certainly focused its attention on “hybrid” functionality that allows organizations to truly live with one foot on-premise and one foot in the public cloud if need be. Windows Server 2019 new features and functionality is accentuated by the new Windows Admin Center which provides the GUI interface to most if not all of the new features that are found in Windows Server 2019.
What is Windows Admin Center?
Windows Admin Center started out as “Project Honolulu” and is a new graphical server management tool that allows managing virtually all aspects of local and remote Windows Servers. The Windows Admin Center is also created as an extensible platform that allows vendors to write specific plugins that can integrate into the Windows Admin Center and allow vendors to add their vendor specific API hooks into the interface for easily querying and configuring their products and hardware. Microsoft has made no secret about the fact that Windows Admin Center is the way forward for Windows Server management. The fact that Windows Server 2019 heavily relies on the interfaces built on top of Windows Admin Center is a testament to this fact.
One of the huge new advancements with Windows Server 2019 is the tight integration with the Windows Admin Center. The Windows Admin Center is perhaps THE tool that will allow running Server Core feasible and easily possible from a management perspective. One of the challenges with Server Core is having the ability to effectively manage a Server Core installation. Now with Windows Admin Center, having a single pane of glass to manage all your Server Core installations is now a reality.
Aside from the new enhanced Windows Admin Center features, let’s take a look at the following enhanced areas:
- Hyper-Converged
- Security
- Cloud, Containers, and Application Development
Windows Server 2019 New Hyper-Converged Features
Microsoft has certainly taken hyper-converged infrastructure seriously with Windows Server 2019. The enhanced features in regards to the new Storage Space Direct functionality that was introduced in Windows Server 2016 are certainly not small ones. Microsoft has quadrupled the maximum storage spaces direct pool to 4 PB which is Petabytes. This is up from around 1 PB in Windows Server 2016. Also, the maximum amount of storage per server is up to 400 TB from 100 TB in Windows Server 2016.
Microsoft has in addition upped the performance of Storage Spaces Direct in Windows Server 2019. Now, Microsoft has set a new record for Storage Spaces Direct with fewer servers – 13,000,000 IOPs with (8) servers hosting storage. This is certainly impressive performance indeed!
Also, a new “True Two-node” feature has been introduced that allows businesses to easily host software-defined storage environments very cost-effectively in edge environments with very little infrastructure or limited connectivity. This solution allows using a simple USB key hosted on a commodity router to serve as the “witness share” that determines quorum.
Windows Server 2019 New Security Features
There are quite a number of new security enhancements found in Windows Server 2019. The stance from Microsoft is to bolster those mechanisms that enforce Protection, Detection, and Response to security events. The enhanced security stance including the focused areas utilize new enhanced features such as the Windows Defender ATP module which is included by default. Windows Defender ATP does a great job of detecting zero-day exploits before they are even known, further guarding systems against attacks.
Shield VMs have been enhanced to include Linux virtual machines along with Windows VMs. Additionally, the active directory attestation is being deprecated in favor of the new Host key attestation that is easier to setup and provides roughly the same security features as does AD attestation.
From an SDN perspective, new with software defined networking, encrypted subnets are now available that allow encrypting network traffic traversing the wire. As the name suggests, these are configurable at an IP subnet level. This effectively prevents someone with access to the physical network from snooping SDN traffic that is being carried over the physical network.
Windows Server 2019 Cloud, Containers, and Application Development Enhancements
As mentioned, Microsoft has “baked in” hybrid cloud functionality into Windows Server 2019 and they tout that these features are not “bolt on” features, but rather integrated into the Windows Server operating system. Using Windows Admin Center, there are various Azure cross functional features that are available for administrators to make use of. This includes Azure backup functionality, Azure AD enhancements as well as storage migration services that allow making use of cloud services in on-premise enterprise datacenters. This provides organizations with the best of both worlds.
New and improved container support with Windows Server 2019 provides a much more efficient and leaner container image that has been refined even further from a space perspective. There is greatly improved app compatibility with Kubernetes and also new enhancements contained in the Windows Subsystem for Linux in Windows Server 2019. This only serves to improve even further the interoperability with Linux environments and natively Linux tools such as OpenSSH and others.
All of the above features make for an extremely agile and efficient application development platform that allows developers to have a high performance, lean, and agile infrastructure base to test and deploy code. Windows Server 2019 represents the latest and greatest functionality for agile development and interoperability with hybrid cloud environments such as with Microsoft Azure.
Concluding Thoughts
With the release of Windows Server 2019, businesses will soon be able to get their hands on the latest next-generation Windows Server operating system that provides the newest features in Hyper-Converged, Security, and Application Development. With the download being imminent in October of 2018, businesses will be able to get their hands on the functionality very soon indeed. With the new Windows Admin Center functionality being designed specifically with Windows Server 2019 in mind, the management, configuration, and hybrid cloud features are easily viewed and managed for all servers from a single pane-of-glass interface. The extensibility of the Windows Admin Center also makes a great platform for third-party vendors to write their own modules that allow managing custom applications and hardware all from within the Windows Admin Center. Windows Server 2019 is certainly a step forward and will take the enterprise datacenter to the next level once it is released.
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