Here’s a stack of free Microsoft eBooks

Available in multiple formats….

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mssmallbiz/archive/2015/07/07/i-m-giving-away-millions-of-free-microsoft-ebooks-again-including-windows-10-windows-8-1-windows-8-windows-7-office-2013-office-365-sharepoint-2013-dynamics-crm-powershell-exchange-server-lync-2013-system-center-azure-clo.aspx

[What a monster link!]

Here comes Windows Server 2012 R2

So you are wondering what happens to Windows Server 2012 now that Windows 8.1 will be out later this year.

Well, Windows Server 2012 will be updated quite a bit and will be called Windows Server 2012 R2.

Microsoft expects to improve on various features that are in Windows Server 2012. Windows Server 2012 R2 will offer even more cloud based options. Here are some of the features added or improved:

• Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 R2 provides host support for 320 logical processors, 4TB of physical memory and 1,024 active virtual machines per host and supports 64-node clusters, 8,000 VMs per cluster, and a 64 TB virtual disk format with the ability for online resize.
• Live migration with RDMA (remote direct memory access) is another new feature in Windows Server 2012 R2; it delivers the highest performance for live migrations over greater than 10 Gbit network connections, supporting transfer speeds of up to 56 GB/s, by offloading the transfer to hardware and harnessing the power of RDMA technologies.
• Windows Server 2012 R2 – Hyper-V now offers full dynamic memory support for Linux guests including minimum memory setting, Hyper-V smart paging, memory ballooning, and runtime configuration.
• New in Windows Server 2012 R2, SMB sessions can now also be managed per share (not just per file server), increasing flexibility. And SMB Scale-out now also offers finer-grained load distribution by distributing workloads from a single client across many nodes of a scale-out file server.
• Storage QoS is a new feature in Windows Server 2012 R2 that allows you to restrict disk throughput for overactive or disruptive virtual machines and can be configured dynamically while the virtual machine is running.
• If you just have a few servers to protect or you are using the built-in Windows Server Backup tool on these servers, Windows Azure Backup is a separate offering that extends the capabilities of Windows Server Backup and System Center Data Protection Manager to deliver simple and reliable off-site data protection at the cost of cloud storage.
• In Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows PowerShell 4.0 delivers over 3,000 cmdlets to enable you to manage server roles and automate management tasks quickly. You can also execute and monitor scripts more efficiently through more robust session connectivity, workflow capabilities, enhanced job scheduling, and Windows PowerShell Web Access.
• Added is IIS CPU throttling can be used to set the maximum CPU consumption allowed per application pool. Because the recommended setup is to create a separate application pool (sandbox) for each tenant, administrators can use CPU throttling to prevent one tenant’s application from monopolizing CPU resources needed by other tenants.
• Windows Server 2012 R2 uses a centralized SSL certificate store that dynamically maps sites to certificates: SSL certificates can be stored centrally on a file share in Windows Server 2012 R2, which helps to simplify certificate management and lower the total cost of ownership.
• Windows Server 2012 R2 introduces a new concept known as Workplace Join which allows users to register their BYO devices for single sign-on and access to corporate data. As part of this registration process, a certificate is installed on the device, and a new device object is created in Active Directory. This device object establishes a link between the user and their device, making it known to IT, and allowing the device to be authenticated, effectively establishing a seamless 2nd factor authentication.
• Also new is Work Folders, which allows users to synchronize files, originating from corporate file servers to their devices anywhere through a synchronization service.
• In Windows Server 2012 R2, automatic VPN connections provide automated starting of the VPN when a user launches an application that requires access to corporate resources. The user may still be prompted for two-factor credentials, but the requirement to initiate the connection before starting the application is removed; it will start whenever an application requires it.
• Windows Server 2012 R2 provides a single view of all user information, allowing organizations to reduce security risk and lower the burden of managing multiple credentials.
• Storage de-duplication for VDI now supports live VHDs, which means that data de-duplication can now be performed on open VHD/VHDX files on remote VDI storage with cluster-shared-volume (CSV) support.

Of course Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials will get similar treatments.

What’s new in Windows Server 8 (part 2)?

Adding to my blog from February [ https://ebraiter.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/whats-new-in-windows-server-8/ ] here are additional features that should be included in Windows Server 8:

The Metro interface: Windows Server 8 will also have the Metro interface but will extend to the Start Menu and the Server Manager.

DHCP Failover: Microsoft is implementing DHCP Failover which addresses one of the issues that can commonly create downtime issues by being a single point of failure.

Server Manager: Centralized multi-server management and also gets a Metro UI makeover which you can now monitor and manage multiple servers.

Hyper-V’s increased scalability: A single Hyper-V 3 cluster will be able to support up to 4,000 hosts, with each host will support up to 2 TB of RAM and 160 logical processors. Each VM can support up to 32 vCPUs and 512 GB of RAM.

Domain controllers are virtualization-aware: Windows Server 8-based domain controllers can run on Hyper-V 3.0!

Storage Spaces: Administrators can combine storage from any number of sources. As a simple example, you can combine USB sticks with internal SATA disks into a single storage pool that can be partitioned any way you want.

Resilient File System (ReFS): The successor to NTFS, ReFS builds on a subset of NTFS features while optimizing the file system for massive scale and resiliency. Include large volume, file and directory sizes, storage pooling and virtualization, and data striping for performance and redundancy for fault tolerance. Can handle something like 281 trillion terabytes.

PowerShell 3.0: Now includes scheduled jobs, delegated administration and simplified language syntax which make commands and scripts look a lot less like code and a lot more like natural language.