“We don’t spend much time on our virtualisation competitors any more. We’ve moved beyond that,” said Jeffrey Snover, Windows Server and System Center Lead Architect, at a press preview of Windows Server 2012 R2. “How many of you ever paid for a sorting library? Memory managers? TCP stacks? Now you just get it in the operating …

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Monday 3rd June 2013 15:58 GMT W. Anderson

Some nitty gritty on Windows Serve 2012, not fluff

The statement by Jeffrey Snover, Windows Server and System Center Lead Architect .." How many of you ever paid for a sorting library? Memory managers? TCP stacks? Now you just get it in the operating system. That is the inevitable progression of our industry." is a foregone reality and the defacto status in *NIX operating systems for decades.

If he meant in saying "...our industry", he was referring strictly to Microsoft Windows, then that point needed to be clarified, since too many Microsoft technologists seem to publicly extrapolate anything technological for Redmond as to automatically (and naively) mean the rest of the "World".

Maybe Mr. Snover can articulate the situation with new ResFS File System in Windows Server 2012, that is apparently an attempt to emulate the capabilities of the incredible (by comparison) Oracle ZFS File System, but according to most all expert reports does not scale anywhere near as well or is as robust as ZFS. There are no tech media pundits, on ZDNet (Microsoft's most trusted and vocal propaganda outlet) or elsewhere who address this particular topic of interest to many of us *Nix-ers.

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Monday 3rd June 2013 16:00 GMT Avatar of They

Sigh.

What if your server isn't allowed access to the internet? Doesn't bode well for a Cloud does it? Three clouds you can't connect to because of massive security risk

Nice one MS!!!!!!!!!

They still have a long way to go in the 'real' world. Where policies and security measures are needed and not everyone wants a frikkin' cloud.

I am bias however as I spent my day installing an office 2010 package that needed me to turn off "Windows Explorer" to get it to install, yes you have to turn everything 'visual' off and use the force to get it to install.

Roll on the weekend.

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1. Monday 3rd June 2013 18:46 GMT Vince
  
  Re: Sigh.
  
  Um... I think you might have missed the point somewhat my friend.
  
  Windows *can* provide this triple cloud (don't blame MS for the stupid use of the word and the almost meaningless definition it now has), but it doesn't say nor require you to engage in this.
  
  If "in house" and "azure" with some "third party hosted" makes sense, fill your boots. If it doesn't, no worries, as you were!
  
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Monday 3rd June 2013 17:54 GMT MissingSecurity

Maybe its the writing...

...but this sure reads like everyone at Microsoft thinks that the "Cloud" is a magical place where stuff just happens.

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1. Monday 3rd June 2013 18:52 GMT John P
  
  Re: Maybe its the writing...
  
  From the user's/manager's perspective, that's exactly what a Cloud is - a generic pool of stuff that works just how you want when you want.
  
  Not everyone wants/needs a Cloud, but it seems as if it is all optional so if you don't want it, don't install it.
  
  Trying to unify private and public cloud in this way is actually quite clever. With Google and, to a lesser extent, AWS, you have to choose whether to go on premises or cloud right from the beginning or risk having to go through the pain of migration. What MS are trying to do is give you the tools to do private cloud if you want to, for instance if you know you will need to use offsite resources eventually, but aren't there yet. When you hit the limit of your internal resources, you have the option of spreading this over to Azure without having to learn a new toolset or manage them both as individual sets of resources.
  
  And more Powershell, can't argue with that.
  
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Monday 3rd June 2013 23:42 GMT Infernoz

Flawed as usual

PowerShell this, PowerShell that; I thought scripting was being replaced by multi-OS management tools.

A VM which only runs the latest MS OS and can't emulated H/W is freaking useless, because we want to run older OS and other OS like say FreeBSD which can run the non-joke filesystems like ZFS *, and we want to hardware access too, because not everything works across a network. ResFS is a vastly inferior to ZFS; don't be fooled by the similar terminology used.

If I was an enterprise admin, I'd probably want a proper hypervisor OS which is optimised to run and support VMs, without all the unnecessary cruft in a 'server' (glorified client) bloated carp kernel OS.

All my critical data is on redundant ZFS FreeNAS because I don't trust anything else to keep it safe e.g. NTFS and the Windows filesystem cache are a race condition botch up; I can easily replicate inconsistent file state race conditions on a high spec. i7 Win 7 64-bit machines, and proved that it had happened on beefy Windows Servers too! Fixed in Windows 8 or 2012? I doubt it; you probably need a proper transactional filesystem, like ZFS, for that.

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2. Tuesday 4th June 2013 12:51 GMT Keith Langmead
  
  Re: Flawed as usual
  
  "A VM which only runs the latest MS OS and can't emulated H/W is freaking useless..."
  
  Where does it say that's your only choice? If your client machine's running 2012 you can take advantage of the benefits of a generation 2 VM, if not then you continue like before with a normal VM that functions like it always has.
  
  "If I was an enterprise admin, I'd probably want a proper hypervisor OS which is optimised to run and support VMs, without all the unnecessary cruft in a 'server' (glorified client) bloated carp kernel OS."
  
  If you were an enterprise admin you'd probably already know that Hyper-V is a type 1 hypervisor, so it's already running on bare metal without the OS bloat. You can install the standalone Hyper-V Server to avoid having a management OS on the server, or install Server 2012 with Hyper-V, but either way the Hyper-V part is type 1. In the latter case the Windows OS is technically referred to as a management OS rather a host (since the other guest OS's sit on-top of Hyper-V NOT Windows Server).
  
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3. Thursday 6th June 2013 16:13 GMT Michael Wojcik
  
  Re: Flawed as usual
  
  Not the bloated carp! Man, that's one fat fish.
  
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Tuesday 4th June 2013 10:34 GMT deadlockvictim

Cloud requires Internet access

Maybe I'm missing something here but the magic of the Cloud is predicated on your internet access. It also means that your virtual servers may be located in a different jurisdiction.

Anyone who has had the misfortune of having a digger sever your net connection understands how much work can be done if your server is not local. I spent the day studying while it was being fixed.

Anyone who remembers the War in Iraq will remember how BBC became unavailable in the US during the course of the war. Of course, if you locate all of your servers in the States, there is the possibility of disruption during the next war. How many here felt at the beginning of September 2001 that war was inevitable?

Can any of the security experts here state with even a high degree of certainty that the contents of your servers will be protected from the snooping eyes allowed by the PATRIOT act and other such laws?

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1. Thursday 6th June 2013 16:23 GMT Michael Wojcik
  
  Re: Cloud requires Internet access
  
  You can have on-premise clouds - one of the "three clouds" discussed in the article is private clouds managed by System Center. You can have private clouds located at another site connected via private physical network. You can have redundant network links.
  
  As for legal exposure due to physical server location: certainly that's a risk. Security is not about eliminating all risks, however; that's a Sisyphean goal and utterly naive. Security is a matter of modeling and estimating risks so they can be reduced and hedged against in as close to an optimal cost/benefit ratio as possible. For many organizations, the risks of moving data and/or processing to utility IT providers (non-private "cloud") could very well be part of that optimal solution.
  
  But hey, points for raising exactly the same vague objections (connectivity, legal exposure) that have appeared in the comments on every single story about "cloud computing" in the Reg for the past decade. No doubt there are some readers who had not yet encountered them or thought of them on their own.
  
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