Microsoft has released an insider build of Windows Server
Hello Windows Insiders!Windows Server Insider Preview Build 16237
On June 15th we announced some very exciting news: Windows Server will now have more frequent releases providing customers who are innovating quickly an opportunity to take advantage of new OS capabilities at a faster pace, both in applications – particularly those built on containers and microservices – as well as in the software-defined datacenter.
Today we are very excited to be releasing the first Windows Server Insider Preview to Windows Insiders: Build 16237. To access to the latest Windows Server preview release, register at the Windows Insiders for Business program or the Windows Insider Program.
Windows Server Datacenter Core and Standard Core editions are headless operating systems and are best managed remotely. For more information, please refer to Configure a Server Core installation of Windows Server with Sconfig.cmd. Updated remote administration information will be provided with future Insider releases.
General Scenario Highlights
Developers and Containers:
New base container images (available on Windows Insider Docker Hub repo)
Optimized Nano Server base image (over 70% smaller)
The .NET team is providing an preview image based on Nano Server with .NET Core 2.0
The PowerShell team is providing a preview image based on PowerShell 6.0
Optimized Server Core base image (over 20% smaller)
Support for SMB volume mounting
Infrastructure for Orchestrators
Networking enhancements for on going Kubernetes work
Named pipe mapping support
Bug fixes, performance enhancements
Cloud Guest:
IIS
TLS info: administrators can make specific recommendations to default to HTTPS
Disaster Recovery
Storage Replica Test Failover
Guest + Host better together
vPMEM in Guest: Tenants can use and manage PMEM/SCM
Tenant-Aware VM Start Ordering: App Ready / OS Heartbeat for better load balancing
Guest RDMA
Improvement in time accuracy
Azure enlightened clusters – optimized to run on Azure IaaS
Cloud Host:
Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) host
Security
Shielded Linux VM
SDN: Encrypted virtual networks
Secure clusters
SMB 1 disabled by default
Resiliency and Availability
SDN: Reduced downtime for tenant connections through gateways
Spaces Direct: Scoped Spaces to mitigate impact of multi-node loss
Spaces Direct: Marginal drive handling for predictive detection of drive failures
Efficiency
Data Deduplication available for ReFS
New Data Deduplication DataPort API for optimized ingress/egress
Space efficiency with ReFS Compaction
Performant Spaces Direct Multi Resilient Volumes (MRV)
Hyper-converged Scale
Cluster Sets: Significantly increases hyper-converged SDDC cloud scale by grouping multiple clusters into a larger fabric
Hardware support
Support for Storage Class Memory (SCM) in Spaces Direct
What’s New in Build 16237 for Server
Persistent Memory can now be exposed to Hyper-V VMs:
In this build, NTFS-formatted direct access volumes that are created on non-volatile DIMMs can now be exposed Hyper-V VMs. This enables Hyper-V VMs to leverage the low-latency performance benefits of Persistent Memory devices.
Virtualized Persistent Memory (vPMEM) is enabled by creating a VHD file (.vhdpmem) on a direct access volume on a host, adding a vPMEM Controller to a VM, and adding the created device (.vhdpmem) to a VM. Using vhdpmem files on direct access volumes on a host to back vPMEM enables allocation flexibility and leverages a familiar management model for adding disks to VMs.
PowerShell can be used for the creation and management of Virtualized Persistent Memory.
Battery Passthrough:
With new additions to Set-VM, a PowerShell cmdlet, you can now enable and disable Battery Passthrough, a new feature. Battery Passthrough let your VMs have the same battery state as the host they are on. To use this feature of Set-VM, use the flag -BatteryPassthroughEnabled {$true, $false}. This option is only available for version 8.2 virtual machines.
Improvements to Container Networking:
This build introduces enhancements to container networking to better support Kubernetes by adding support for multiple containers (w/out Hyper-V isolation) to a single Pod (Network Compartment) as well as only requiring a single endpoint per Pod for all traffic types (e.g. ingress and East-West)
The Host Networking Service (HNS) now has support for creating ACL, NAT, and Load Balancing network policies for Container endpoints for fine-grained policy application.
RDMA for Trusted Guests:
This build includes several enhancements for (Trusted) Guest RDMA to enable low-latency storage access with zero CPU usage by Trusted Guest VMs – this is ideal for running Windows File Servers in a Guest to accelerate file serving. Requires updated NIC drivers.
Improvements to Software Defined Networking:
Encryption can be enabled for virtual network subnets to protect your traffic from anyone with physical access to the wire, including network administrators.
Failover time for SDN gateways is improved. Now, you will observe much faster failover times for the gateways, even with high number of connections.
Access control lists can be applied for infrastructure on logical subnets.
Improvements in Networking transports:
2X throughput improvement for single connection TCP and UDP performance in low latency intra-datacenter scenarios
Default congestion control algorithm CUBIC for high speed networks
Improvements in HTTP(s):
SSL throttling to enable predictable service for established connections, in the face of high incoming SSL traffic.
Deterministic certificate updates for HTTPS enabling greater service availability.
Improvements in time accuracy:
Pressing EU regulations in 2018 require strict time precision and traceability. Win32tm improvements in RS3 support greater time accuracy, and jitter is removed from the measurements that calibrate the service.
New system event logging lets you archive time service data to support traceability compliance.
System center monitoring now includes a new rule which lets you detect when a machine in your environment is out of compliance.
Nano Server optimized for Containers:
Nano Server is now a container only option and optimized for containers, more information is available in the Delivering continuous innovation with Windows Server blog post. To optimize for containers, several features were removed that were in the Nano Server base image in Windows Server 2016, these include WMI, PowerShell, .NET Core, and the Servicing stack, which has significantly reduced the image size.
Server Core base image optimizations:
The Windows Server Core base image has been optimized saving over 20% download and on disk space.
