Top 6 Windows Server 2019 Features

Since Microsoft has moved to a more gradual Windows Server upgrade, many of the features that will be available with Windows Server 2019 have already been used in live enterprise networks, and here are half a dozen of the best ones.

Enterprise-grade hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI)

With the release of Windows Server 2019, Microsoft has accumulated three years of updates for its HCI platform. Indeed, the rolling upgrade schedule that Microsoft now uses includes what it calls Semi-Annual Channel releases – incremental upgrades as they become available. Then, every two years, it creates a major release called the Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) release that includes upgrades from previous Semi-Annual Channel releases.

The Windows Server 2019 LTSC is due out this fall and is now available to members of Microsoft’s Insider Program.

While core HCI components (compute, storage, and networking) have been enhanced with Semi-Annual Channel releases, for organizations building large-scale software-defined platforms and data centers, Windows Server 2019 is an important release for Software Defined Data Center.

With the latest version, HCI comes in addition to a set of components that are bundled with the server license. This means a backbone of servers running HyperV to allow workloads to scale up or down dynamically without downtime. (To learn more about Microsoft HCI, click here.)

GUI for Windows Server 2019

A surprise to many companies that started rolling out the Semi-Annual Channel releases of Windows Server 2016 was the lack of a GUI for those releases. The Semi-Annual Channel releases only supported ServerCore (and Nano) GUI-less configurations. With the LTSC release of Windows Server 2019, IT professionals will once again get their desktop GUI of Windows Server in addition to the non-GUI ServerCore and Nano versions.

Honolulu Project

With the release of Windows Server 2019, Microsoft will officially release its Project Honolulu server management tool. Project Honolulu is a central console that allows IT professionals to easily manage Windows 2019, 2016, and 2012R2 GUI and non-GUI servers in their environments.

Early adopters found the manageability offered by Project Honolulu by combining common tasks such as performance monitoring (PerfMon), server setup and configuration tasks, and managing Windows services that run on systems. of server. This makes it easier for administrators to manage these tasks on a combination of servers in their environment.

Security enhancements

Microsoft continued to include built-in security features to help organizations cope with a “predicted-in-case-of-breach” security management model. Rather than assuming that firewalls along a company’s perimeter will prevent any security compromises, Windows Server 2019 assumes that servers and applications at the heart of a data center have already been compromised.

Windows Server 2019 includes Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) which assesses common vectors of security vulnerabilities, and automatically blocks and alerts to potential malicious attacks. Windows 10 users have received many features from Windows Defender ATP over the past few months. The inclusion of Windows Defender ATP on Windows Server 2019 allows them to take advantage of data storage, network transport, and security integrity components to prevent compromises on Windows Server 2019 systems.

Smaller and more efficient containers

Businesses quickly minimize the footprint and overhead of their IT operations and eliminate the most overloaded servers with thinner, more efficient containers. Windows Insiders benefited from higher compute density to improve overall application operations without additional spending on hardware server systems or hardware capacity expansion.

Windows Server 2019 has a smaller and lighter ServerCore image that reduces virtual machine overhead by 50-80%. When an organization can achieve the same (or more) functionality in a significantly smaller image, the organization is able to reduce costs and improve the efficiency of IT investments.

Windows subsystem in Linux

Ten years ago, you would rarely have said Microsoft and Linux in the same breath as complementary platform services, but that has changed. Windows Server 2016 offers open support for Linux instances as virtual machines, and the new version of Windows Server 2019 makes huge strides by including a full subsystem optimized for running Linux systems on Windows Server.

The Windows Subsystem for Linux extends the basic operation of Linux systems virtual machines on Windows Server and provides a deeper integration layer for networking, native file system storage, and security controls. It can activate encrypted Linux virtual instances. This is exactly how Microsoft delivered Shielded VMs for Windows in Windows Server 2016, but now native Shielded VMs for Linux on Windows Server 2019.

Companies have found that optimizing containers along with the ability to natively support Linux on Windows Server hosts can reduce costs by eliminating the need for two or three infrastructure platforms and running them instead on Windows Server 2019.

Since most of the “new features” in Windows Server 2019 have been included in updates over the past couple of years, these features aren’t earth-shattering surprises. However, this also means that the features of Windows Server 2019 that were part of the Semi-Annual Channel releases of Windows Server 2016 have already been tried, tested, updated, and proven, so when Windows Server 2019 ships, the organizations won’t have to wait. six to 12 months for a bug fix service pack.

This is a significant change that helps organizations plan their adoption of Windows Server 2019 sooner than organizations have been able to adopt a major release platform in the past, and with significant improvements for centers. enterprise data by getting the benefits of Windows Server 2019 to meet the security, scalability, and optimized data center requirements so needed in today’s rapidly changing environments.

(Rand Morimoto owns consulting firm Convergent Computing, which was Microsoft’s Global Partner of the Year (2014) and one of the first organizations to adopt all Microsoft products and services.)