User Manual

Scenario Feature Description Windows
Server
2008 R2
Windows
Server
2012 R2
Windows
Server
2016
Software-
dened storage,
continued
Storage health monitoring: Provides continuous monitoring,
reporting, and maintenance to support Storage Spaces Direct.
Software-
dened
networking
Network Controller: Provides a centralized, programmable point
of automation to manage, congure, monitor, and troubleshoot
virtualized network infrastructure in your datacenter.
Virtual networking: Helps create network overlays on top of a
shared multi-tenant physical fabric.
Software Load Balancer (SLB): A cloud-optimized Layer 3 and
Layer 4 load balancer that provides both North-South and East-
West load balancing.
Distributed rewall and microsegmentation: Dynamically
segment networks based on evolving security or application
needs using a stateful rewall and network security groups.
Hybrid SDN gateways: Multi-tenanted, highly available gateways
that connect customer virtual networks to Azure, other Windows
Server-powered clouds, high speed WANs, and local non-
virtualized resources.
Converged RDMA: Converge RDMA storage trafc and tenant
Ethernet trafc on the same underlying NIC team for signicant
cost savings, while getting the desired throughput and quality of
service.
IP Address Management (IPAM) and DNS: IPAM now supports
comprehensive DNS and DHCP management with role-based
access control across multiple AD forests. DNS provides for
trafc management, load balancing, and split-brain deployments
and prevention of DNS amplication attacks.
Other
Capabilities
PowerShell 5.1: Provides enhanced scripting capabilities for
conguration, management and deployment of software-dened
datacenter components.
MultiPoint Services Role: New role in Windows Server 2016 that
enables low cost-per-seat by allowing multiple users to run their
own sessions while connected to one machine.
RDS RemoteFX vGPU: Provides a rich desktop remoting
experience (up to 4k) by allowing multiple VMs to share the
same physical GPU for graphics acceleration.
High-availability RDS Connection Broker: Helps create a fault-
tolerance connection broker for Remote Desktop scenarios.
RDS VM architecture for cloud: Windows Server 2016 can
leverage Azure services for more cost effective solutions.
(Application Proxy, AD Domain Services).
Nano Server installation option: New remote-administered
option for private clouds and datacenters.
Not Supported Limited Support Fully Supported