User Manual

Rethink operations to boost
efciency, security
Datacenter operations seem to earn more scrutiny than budget these days.
New applications stretch the operational fabric and create infrastructure
backlogs that can slow down business. IT organizations are expected to do
more with less, but an aging infrastructure with little automation becomes
a hindrance to moving forward. Meanwhile, security breaches make front
page news and reputations suffer.
As organizations look beyond server virtualization to achieve more efciency,
they can use Windows Server 2016 capabilities to meet operational and
security challenges, freeing up IT resources to plan and innovate on future
solutions that drive business success.
Automate routine datacenter operations
If a major goal is to gain scale without adding more cost, one strategy is the
appropriate use of automation. IT organizations need to accommodate a
growing number of business requests while maintaining existing applications
and infrastructure. Organizations that have already wrung all available cost
savings from server virtualization can consider virtualizing networking and
storage. By doing so, they can reduce costs with less expensive hardware,
eliminate complexity, and gain the ability to manage by policy, automation,
and orchestration, versus manual and static congurations.
Substantial operational efciencies are possible using PowerShell capabilities
in Windows Server 2016, which enable IT admins to use one console to
automate, deploy, congure, manage, and decommission applications,
servers, settings, and users on one server or many. The enhanced Desired
State Conguration environment can save time by dening the desired
state and delivering automatic alerting and remediation if things go wrong.
This automation helps IT admins offer infrastructure as a service to internal
customers on a self-service basis to address the onslaught of deployment
and conguration requests.
IT administrators now have new options for virtualized environments,
enabling them to select and implement what makes sense for to increase
efciencies and reduce cost.
Drive efciency with a software-dened datacenter
with Windows Server 2016
Maximizing efciency
Here are three more ways Windows Server
2016 helps organizations increase efciency
and reduce cost.
Hyper-converged infrastructure
Hyper-efcient infrastructure. The
ultimate expression of the software-
dened datacenter tightly integrates
the computing, networking, storage,
virtualization, and hardware resources in
a compute environment for simplicity and
scalability. Windows Server 2016 can help
organizations realize the benets of hyper-
converged environments.
Nano Server
Efcient OS. Reduce your datacenter
footprint with Nano Server, a new remote-
administered installation option for private
clouds and datacenters. Minimize attack
surface, increase availability, and reduce
resource usage.
Cluster OS Rolling Upgrade
Efcient upgrades. Administrators can
now upgrade server clusters from Windows
Server 2012 R2 to Windows Server 2016
without stopping Hyper-V or Scale-Out File
Server workloads.
“ What Microsoft achieved with Storage
Spaces Direct is nothing short of incredible.
Great performance, great exibility at a
great price. With the ability to use NVMe
or SSD as a cache and SSD or HDD for
capacity, together with RDMA network
adapters, all performance needs are
covered.”
– David Knappett, Technical Architect
Alternative Networks