Windows Server 2012

The book I read to research this post was Introducing Windows Server 2012 R T M Edition by Mitch Tulloch which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. This book is just an introduction to Windows Server 2012 & really just covers the main features and how to install it. It is the biggest upgrade in the history of Windows Server and the biggest change in computing is cloud computing which is catered for. This program works seamlessly with cloud computing platforms with support in particular for the Microsoft offerings like Azure & Office 365. Now it is possible as long as you are logged into your computer to avoid having to log in to your cloud environment separately. There is also a huge increase in the hardware that Windows Server 2012 works with, Server 2008 just worked with upto 64 processors for example but Server 2012 works with upto 2048 virtual processors. It also has support for working with several hard drives as one virtual hard drive or volume as they call it. This it has in common with Windows 8. It also will share a network hard drive between 2 hosts. Mitch was one of the developers of Server 2012 and a lot of this book gives addresses of sites like blogs for more information about various subjects. There is also sidebars in the book where people who have worked on particular aspects of Server 2012 write about certain things. It still uses Internet Information Server 8 which is the same as in Server 2008. There is also a server core version on the same disc as the graphical version of Server 2012 which allows you to use a command line and doesn't upload the graphical parts of Server 2012. Some components like Internet Explorer aren't installed with this version.