Windows Server 2016 Third Technology Preview New Features: Containers are Highlights

To be competitive in today's fast-changing business environment, application delivery speed is key. As a result, many companies are looking for ways to move applications from the development phase to the production phase faster, and continue to improve to respond to business changes. Containers are increasingly being seen as the ideal solution for development operations, giving developers more flexibility while reducing the operational management challenges facing IT departments.

A few days ago, Microsoft publicly released the third technology preview of Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016, and opened the download. The former is a server version of Windows 10, mainly for hybrid clouds, while the latter is a supporting data center management tool.

Microsoft said that it hopes to help users bring the flexibility of cloud computing to the enterprise through these two tools. At the same time, Microsoft hopes that users can understand their latest products and feedback their opinions to make progress together.

The biggest highlight of this release is Windows Container, Chinese name <; container”. This is the first step in bringing container technology to the Windows Server ecosystem, which Microsoft believes is the next evolution of virtualization.

The so-called container is an isolated, resource-controlled, portable operating environment. It provides system-level virtualization that enables multiple isolated applications to run in a single container host without interfering with the system, greatly simplifying application development and deployment and ensuring system security.

Classes interested in this technology can refer to Microsoft's official website and Mike Neil's blog post.

Of course, the container is just one of the new features. Other things to watch out for are:

- Nano Server

Minimum memory deployment options that can be installed on a physical host or virtual On the machine, a lot of extensions have been added, and there is no increase in memory usage. The new Emergency Management Console allows users to view and repair network configurations directly in the Nano Server console.

The new PowerShell script can be used to create Azure virtual machines running Nano Server, and from an application perspective, it is now possible to run ASP.Net v5 applications using CoreCLR.

- Software Defined Network

The vast majority of network features are new. Introduced scalable network controllers for programming policies, L4 load balancers for high availability and high performance, enhanced gateways for hybrid connectivity, and underlying network fabrics that combine RDMA traffic and tenant traffic. Users can experience the core network function suite and SDN architecture used in Azure for the first time.

- Security

Increased investment in Hyper-V, including some security innovations for the next release. Virtual machine isolation helps protect resources in a shared environment.

Now, users can create a shielded virtual machine with its signature template test and its other features, and with the Host Guardian Service, administrators can identify legitimate hosts.

- Workload Support

Additional features and capabilities for enhanced critical work support include: Enhanced application compatibility with RemoteGL Services (RDS) with OpenGL support, with storage copies ( Storage Replica) improves business continuity scenarios for site awareness for extended clusters, adding flexibility by removing specific domain containers for SQL Server clusters.

- Management

In System Center 2016 Third Technology Preview, enhanced features simplify the management of new features in Windows Server. This includes improvements to the virtual machine manager, such as support for rolling upgrades of cluster nodes, and support for Nano Server as a host and file server. By easily managing isolated virtual machines and protected hosts, users can take advantage of security enhancements for shared environments.

Improvements in storage can satisfy end-to-end quality of service (QoS) and faster data (using storage tiering) retrieval.

In addition, Microsoft has released Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) for Windows 10 clients to enable remote management of Windows Server 2016 Technology Preview, Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Server 2012.

For more information on Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016 3rd Edition Technology Preview, check out the full preview.