And because a Datacenter license gave your rights to unlimited virtual instances of Windows Server once you licensed all the processors in a. DataCenter, Standard, Essentials, Multiple Premium, Storage server, Hyper-V server. Download for free Microsoft’s comprehensive Licensing Datasheet. Explains how to upgrade or convert Windows Server to newer versions, different editions, or switch between licensing options.
 
 

 

Windows Server licensing, new features, and more things you need to know! – Calculate the price of your order

 

In their own words, Microsoft says the per-core model “aligns licensing of private and public cloud environments to a consistent currency and simplifies licensing across multi-cloud infrastructures.

While Windows Server introduces many features that benefit on-premises users, Microsoft’s shift to a “cloud-first” design focus resulted in a portable server OS that’s optimized for hybrid or native-cloud scenarios.

As part of this optimization, Microsoft made it easier to move local, WS Hyper-V workloads to Azure’s public cloud. What else does a “cloud-ready” OS include? Both Nano Server and Windows Server Containers provide new options that can help IT departments be “secure, efficient and agile” in the cloud. To help keep cloud costs under control in Windows Server , Microsoft introduced the “headless,” cloud-optimized Nano Server OS deployment option, which runs much leaner than even the already slimmed-down Server Core option.

And the fewer resources you use, the less you can expect to pay for your cloud instances. The reduced size of Nano server will also speed up deployment and migration times in scenarios where data needs to be copied across a local network or migrated to a public cloud.

Security is another benefit of running a minimal operating system. With fewer services running, drivers loaded, and ports open, the attack surface of Nano Server is greatly reduced.

Because of the minimal nature of Nano Server, you need to manage it remotely through tools such as PowerShell, or Microsoft System Center , or new Server Management tools that work locally or with Azure. Another caveat: Software Assurance is required if you want to deploy Nano Server , which could limit its use to larger enterprises with bigger budgets.

Windows Server supports software containers, which are portable, bounded spaces that encapsulate an application and its dependencies. Containers isolate applications so they don’t interfere with other applications or processes outside of the container.

Containers are very similar to virtual machines in that they have a view of their own file system, registry, and IP addresses. However, while an application running in a Windows Server container thinks it has it’s own OS, it’s really sharing the OS kernel with its host and any other containers or processes running on the host. This means you don’t need to install an OS on top of a container like you would with a VM, so you don’t have to worry about obtaining OS licenses for each Windows Server container you create.

This also means that starting up a Windows Server container happens very quickly, because you don’t have to deal with potentially lengthy OS reboot times.

Source: Microsoft Windows Server containers blog post. For IT Professionals, containers provide a standardized environment that can be passed between development, QA, and production teams and servers. For example, all registry settings will persist when migrating a containerized app between hosts because containers abstract away differences between OS installations and the underlying hardware.

This makes containers great for development and testing purposes. Windows Server Containers work either locally, in VMs, or in a cloud instance. Containers also integrate with Docker, a leading software container platform. There are 2 types of containers in Windows Server Windows Server containers, which we’ve described up to this point, and Hyper-V Containers, which use a lightweight Hyper-V VM to encapsulate a Windows Server container for an additional degree of isolation.

One of the biggest challenges in IT today is securing devices and data in the face of an ever-growing number of threats. Fortunately, Windows Server introduces to new features that can protect servers, including:. Shielded VMs utilize encryption and virtual TPMs Trusted Platform Modules to ensure virtual machines only run on approved hosts and are accessed by only approved users.

It’s not always the case that every admin should have privileges on every server physical or virtual , so this new feature will enable different user access permissions per VM. Device Guard allows IT pros to restrict systems to only install applications that have been digitally signed or given an exception to run on the machine in question.

This will cut down on malware infections, as someone will have reviewed an application before approving it, adding an extra layer of protection. Credential Guard protects user credentials that are stored in memory. On older OSes, unencrypted, plain-text password hashes might be stored in computer memory Credential guard encrypts cached data so its harder for malicious parties to get their hands on sensitive information using a “pass the hash” attack.

Similarly, Remote Credential Guard prevents credentials from being sent back to the target server so password hashes aren’t shared. JitJea Just in time, Just enough administration allows IT departments to set different PowerShell privileges for different admins, which is useful in larger organizations with bigger IT departments. In a SpiceWorld presentation, the father of PowerShell, Jeffrey Snover, compared JEA to a blast container, because if something goes wrong, it can help contain the damage to a much smaller area.

PowerShell is a powerful, much-beloved, time-saving tool for IT pros. And the recently released PowerShell 5. Here’s what you can look forward to:. To use this feature if you need Windows 10 or Windows Server guest VMs, have ti be logged into the host as a Hyper-V admin, and must have valid user credentials on the VMs you want to manage.

Classes are like a blueprint: They are a programming concept that describes how something should look.

PowerShell testing improvements — The recently released PSScriptAnalyzer looks through your PowerShell code and warns you about common mistakes that maybe be in your scripts.

For automated testing purposes, the Pester test framework was introduced in PowerShell 5 as well. PowerShell Gallery is a community-driven, consolidated library of Powershell code that houses submissions from IT pros and developers.

You can download reliable code from the PowerShell Gallery to use as a starting point if you want to automate common tasks in your environment.

For more info, check out this complete list of new PowerShell 5 features. Here’s what you can look forward to in the latest version of Microsoft’s native hypervisor, Hyper-V:. This new feature reduces downtime and the need to restart VMs. Discrete device assignment grant a VM direct and exclusive access to a PCIe device, bypassing the virtualization stack.

This can be useful if you want better isolation between VMs, want to set up VM hosts in a test environment without the need for lots of physical hardware, or if you want to use Hyper-V containers. Host resource protection — When turned on, this new feature looks for Hyper-V virtual machines that use more than their fair share of resources, then limits what these greedy VMs are allocated when found.

This can help solve the “noisy neighbor” problem that can drag down all of the VMs on a host, and it can help limit the damage caused by cyberattacks. Rolling Cluster Upgrades — If you have a Hyper-V cluster running Windows Server R2, you can upgrade it to Windows Server gradually and without having to stop or restart the cluster, which could help negate downtime.

Software defined storage and networking technologies promise greater efficiency, flexibility, and agility with IT infrastructure. Storage Spaces Direct allows you to build a redundant, block-level, scale-out file cluster using the local storage in standard Windows-based servers, similar to the vSAN technology from VMware.

With a minimum of 3 connected nodes, you can create a shared storage pools across servers that supports performance tiering using SSDs for more frequently accessed data and fault tolerance.

Storage Replica allows you to replicate data even between geographically separated nodes. Storage Replica allows for asynchronous replication across greater distances Storage QoS allows you to set storage performance policies for VMs using the same file server cluster. For example, you can define minimum and maximum IOPs for a group of VMs running mission-critical apps, to ensure you won’t encounter storage-related bottlenecks.

Source: Microsoft QoS blog post. As you can tell, there are a boatload of new features in Microsoft Windows Server If you made it through this entire article without taking a nap, I salute you! My initial thought was Per Core!!!..

Well that really changes things which is their first step to further pushing everyone into Azure. Microsoft goes into livestock auctioning; new scheme is that you must pay for two cows even though you only bought one. Thanks for the write-up! It definitely shows the new features has to offer. I doubt we’ll jump on it this year or next, I think the biggest disappointment is the per-core LIC structure.

I agree that MS is doing all it can to push everyone over to O and Azure. The discrete device assignment does sound interesting. I’ve read up on doing hardware pass-thru in KVM but it seemed a bit advanced for me.

I wonder if this will find its way into Hyper-V Server It’s too bad about that per-core licensing – all the Hyper-V hosts I’m buying now have dual 12 core chips.

Linux or BSDs for example Brand Representative for Microsoft. The per core licensing doesn’t appear to be that bad The Gen9s, I’m not sure on their configuration.

But the DLs we’re about to order Huh, you mean it will now do the same thing as a basic Linux server install but you get to pay thousands for the privilege! Interesting, good luck with that!

So to license the two DCs on seperate hosts we need 32 cores. Only nice thing is we get to run two vm’s per host so instead of the two servers we need we get 4.

Oh yeah, don’t forget your CALs, they arent going anywhere :. The licensing piece is going to confuse the heck out of everyone. I think at the end of the day, you’ll need a lawyer to fully understand it and of course one lawyer, three opinions. Why do they change the way things are constantly. Can’t they just leave well enough alone! They are just trying to suck as much money out of people as possible. Server versions Powershell can make repetitive tasks a lot quicker.

Sure if you only have a few hundred users you might not ever touch it, as things get bigger it is nice to not have to fire up a remote desktop or go through a bunch of mouse clicks. This is even more true now that it is open source and will gain usage in Linux and Unix applications as well.

Pat, I agree. For me, it means more Linux in the data center my approach has always been Linux first in the cloud. Don’t buy until R2 is the current version. I am just sick and tired of being Microsoft’s unpaid tier two beta tester Microsoft doesn’t charge for VMs. Never has. Eventually it gets cheaper to buy Datacenter. Chris Microsoft. So to Chris’s point, on a physical server with a Standard Windows Server license, you could host 2 WS virtual instances and several VMs running Linux if you wanted to.

Like it or not, per core licensing was bound to happen or at least a drastic change to Datacenter licensing. Huge potential revenue stream that Microsoft was missing out on. My windows server only see 4 cores at the most. Why do they have to make all this so confusing? This is getting as hard as figuring out tax codes.

Maybe they’re overplaying their hand here with the expensive licensing. And I hope it’s not an update nightmare like Windows 10 is turning out to be.

Haven’t played with it yet – what’s the UI like? Does it still look like that awful Win8. That is the way to attract new business, change the pricing structure, adding even more needless complexity. I’m not sure if Microsoft is going to make a lot of money on licensing local servers, on azure, or losing a lot of people to Linux servers.

Agreed, it’s not simple to swap the Windows desktop for the end-user, but the same end-user doesn’t care about the technology running in the background that he’s not even aware of. Sure, there are license fees for certain software running on Linux, maybe also per core, but it’s always going to make a huge difference in the pocket of the business and in the end, it’s the service that counts, not who’s delivering the service. Personally, I really don’t understand why customers and now I’m speaking of technically able people keep taking this.

MS has really adopted this attitude of you’re-going-my-way-or-no-way or you’re going to pay big time. I believe that if you have Software Assurance you can grandfather in your existing servers with more than 16 cores. It’s only if you buy a new piece of hardware and need to buy a new Windows license that the per-core requirement is going to hit you hard.

How would the licensing work if I were running vmWare? There technically aren’t any physical NICs to speak of if my hypervisor is vmWare. Windows Server Datacenter. Server Repartitioning. You may reassign licenses on a single piece of hardware sooner than permitted above, when you:. Running Instances of the Additional Software.

You may run or otherwise use any number of instances of additional software listed on the website specified below in physical or virtual operating system environments on any number of devices. You may use additional software only with the server software.

For a list of additional software, see aka. For each server license you acquire, you may create and store any number of instances of the software on any of your servers or storage media.

This may be done solely to exercise your right to run instances of the software under any of your licenses as described in the applicable use rights e.

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No Separation of Server Software. You may not separate the server software for use in more than one operating system environment under a single license, unless expressly permitted.

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By accepting this agreement and using these features, you agree that Microsoft may collect, use, and disclose the information as described in the Privacy Statement aka. The server software may include data storage technology called Windows Internal Database. Components of the server software use this technology to store data. You may not otherwise use or access this technology under this agreement.

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