Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2 Announced

Today at TechEd North America Microsoft announced Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2. The key thing is that these two product will now have the same release schedule from which we can all benefit. Some of the new features for these two products were announced but I bet there are still to come more. Here are some of the features:

• 3 site Hyper-V Replica Replication
• Snapshots, backup, Dynamic Memory and dynamic disks for Linux Machines
• Online shrink and expand of VHD/X disks
• Consistent distribution support for Linux machines by System Center
• Storage Spaces now has Storage Tiers feature
• Deduplication can be used for VDI scenarios
• QoS for virtual disks – Min and Max IOPS
• improving IPAM for virtualized datacenters
• Virtual RSS (vRSS) that makes it easier to virtualize network-intensive physical server workloads
• NIC teaming with dynamic teaming capabilities that distribute load more intelligently than before
• write-back cache feature  for Storage Spaces
• Shared VDHX for Virtual Machines which means easy guest clustering
• Generation 2 VM – UEFI-based
• enhanced VM interaction with full Remote Desktop capabilities
• Remote Access via VMBus
• Export virtual machine while running
• VMM can create File Server Cluster
• File clusters can now leverage Pools in VMM. VMM can alert for % of over provisioning.
• File shares have classifications
• The new version of Orchestrator is entirely based on PowerShell.
• Remote Live Monitoring, which lets you capture network traffic to a specific VM for analysis from outside the VM
• VMs now allows you to choose the replication interval, from 30 seconds up to 15 minute
• NVGRE VPN Gateway as virtual machine – multi tenant, multi site
• Service template in VMM for NVGRE VPN Gateway based on Windows Server 2012 R2
• SCSM SSP now on SharePoint 2013 – not certain
• Live Migration over RDMA
• Live migration compression

There will be even more to come.