{"id":7442,"date":"2013-06-03T15:07:52","date_gmt":"2013-06-03T14:07:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/?p=7442"},"modified":"2013-06-03T15:07:52","modified_gmt":"2013-06-03T14:07:52","slug":"windows-server-2012-r2-system-center-2012-r2-sql-server-14-whats-new-and-what-is-the-cloud-os","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/7442-windows-server-2012-r2-system-center-2012-r2-sql-server-14-whats-new-and-what-is-the-cloud-os.html","title":{"rendered":"Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2, SQL Server 14: what\u2019s new, and what is the Cloud OS?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this month I attended a three-day press briefing on what is coming in the R2 wave of Microsoft\u2019s server products: Windows Server, System Center and SQL Server. <\/p>\n

There is a ton of new stuff, too much for a blog post, but here are the things that made the biggest impression.<\/p>\n

First, I am beginning to get what Microsoft means by \u201cCloud OS\u201d. I am not sure that this a useful term, as it is fairly confusing, but it is worth teasing out as it gives a sense of Microsoft\u2019s strategy. Here\u2019s what lead architect Jeffrey Snover told me:<\/p>\n

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I think of it as a central organising thought. That\u2019s our design centre, that\u2019s our north star. It\u2019s not necessarily a product, it goes across some things \u2026 for example, I would absolutely include SQL [Server] in all of its manifestations in our vision of a cloud OS. Cloud OS has two missions. Abstracting resources for consumption by multiple consumers, and then providing services to applications. Modern applications are all consuming SQL \u2026 we\u2019re evolving SQL to the more scale-out, elastic, on-demand attributes that we think of as cloud OS attributes. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If you want to know what Cloud OS looks like, it is something like this:<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Yes, it\u2019s the Azure portal, and one of today\u2019s big announcements is that this is the future of System Center, Microsoft\u2019s on-premise cloud management system, as well as Azure, the public cloud. Azure technology is coming to System Center 2012 R2 via an add-on called the Azure Pack. Self-service VMs, web sites, SQL databases, service bus messaging, virtual networks, online storage and more.<\/p>\n

Snover also talked about another aspect to Cloud OS, which is also significant. He says that Microsoft sees cloud as an \u201coperating system problem.\u201d This is the key to how Microsoft thinks it can survive and prosper versus VMWare, Amazon and so on. It has a hold of the whole stack, from the tiniest detail of the operating system (memory management, file system, low-level networking and so on) to the highest level, big Azure datacenters. <\/p>\n

The company is also unusual in its commitment to private, public and hybrid cloud. The three cloud story which Microsoft re-iterated obsessively during the briefing is public cloud (Azure), private cloud (System Center) and hosted cloud (service providers). Ideally all three will look the same and work the same \u2013 differences of scale aside \u2013 though the Azure Pack is only the first stage towards convergence. Hyper-V is the common building block, and we were assured that Hyper-V in Azure is exactly the same as Hyper-V in Windows Server, from 2012 onwards.<\/p>\n

I had not realised until this month that Snover is now lead architect for System Center as well as Windows Server. Without both roles, of course, he could scarcely architect \u201cCloud OS\u201d.<\/p>\n

Here are a few other things to note.<\/p>\n

Hyper-V 2012 R2<\/strong> has some great improvements:<\/p>\n