2012 r2 series: enhancements to iaas

oh man, a two-part post! that means twice the reading, twice the summarizing and twice the condensing. :/ oh well. at least all this typing will help warm up my new sculpt keyboard. :) this is the fifth post in the series. read the full post composed of iaas innovations and service provider & tenant iaas experience whenever you get around to it. this covers the first part.

r2 enhancements in networking

• continuous availability (with in-box NIC teaming)
• scvmm has ability to management network switches:
• extensible hyper-v virtual switch
• hyper-v network virtualization (hnv)
• ip address management (ipam):
• better integration with scvmm
• virtual address space management
• granular role-based access control (rbac)
• enhanced dhcp management
• enhanced powershell support
• standards-based switch management – industry standard management schema to treat physical and virtual switches alike using an interface like powershell

 

r2 enhancements in compute

• quality of service controls on virtual machine storage while machine is running
• clustered virtual machines with virtual disks on a separate file server
• cluster aware updating allows deployment of updates to clustered environments with no downtime
• exported copies of running virtual machines
• live migration with compression provides 2x to 3x faster migration, smb direct even faster
• 2nd gen virtual machines, uefi-based reduces use of emulated legacy devices
• full remote desktop capabilities (sound, graphics, and most importantly – copy/paste!)

 

r2 improvements in storage

• optimized smb direct which takes advantage of rdma-enabled network cards
• optimized rebalancing of scale-out file server – smb session transitioned seamlessly to optimal node
• live migration over smb
• faster migration over rdma-enabled nic
• multi-channel capable to stream live migration across multiple nics
• capability to define different bandwidth limits per category of smb traffic
• data automatically moved between tiered storage media based on performance need
• writes to storage satisfied by ssd tier and later written to hdd tier (write-back caching)
• deduplication available on running virtual machine and cluster shared volumes
• storage spaces integrated into scvmm
• storagement management api (sm-api) provides unified management for sans, storage spaces, etc
• scvmm can deploy/configure clustered scale-out file servers