Earlier this morning Microsoft released the Technical Preview of Windows 10, but that isn’t the only new operating system the company has in its store for us today. The Redmond-based technology company has also released the first technical preview of Windows Server v.Next.
The company is yet to pick a name for it, though. It is likely to call it Windows Server 2015, but given its ongoing unification process, the company may end up naming it Windows Server 10, or just Windows 10, because if you remember Windows OS chief Terry Myerson did mention that Windows 10 will also work on computer servers.
The rollout of Technical Preview of the server operating system to general public is also interesting because typically Microsoft only releases it to a select number of customers.
Here are some of the features you are getting in the Technical Preview:
- Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS): New features that enable configuration of ADFS to authenticate users stored in Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directories.
- Remote Desktop Services: Improvements based on customer requests. We added support for OpenGL and OpenCL applications, and added MultiPoint Services as a new role in Windows Server.
- Storage quality of service: Update enables users to create storage QoS policies on a Scale-Out File Server and assign them to one or more virtual disks on Hyper-V virtual machines. Storage Replica is a new feature that enables synchronous replication between servers for disaster recovery, as well as stretching of a failover cluster for high availability.
- A Hyper-V or Scale-out File Server failover cluster: Can now easily be upgraded without any downtime or need to build a new cluster with nodes that are running Windows Server Technical Preview.
- Web Application Proxy: Now supports pre-authentication for applications using the HTTP Basic protocol, wildcards in external URLS of applications, redirection from HTTP to HTTPS, use of pass-through authentication with HTTP applications, publishing of Remote Desktop Gateway apps, a new debug log, propagation of client IP addresses to backend applications, and improvements to the Administrator console.
- Windows PowerShell 5.0: Includes new features, including support for developing with classes, and new security features that extend its use, improve its usability, and allow users to control and manage Windows-based environments more easily and comprehensively.
- Networking: New feature that enables Gehttp://blogs.technet.com/b/server-cloud/archive/2014/09/30/an-early-look-at-the-future-of-the-datacenter-from-microsoft.aspxneric Routing Encapsulation (GRE) for the Windows Server Gateway. In addition, the DNS Server role includes enhanced logging and a new policy based feature for DNS response management.
- You can read the complete set of new features here
For those who are planning to grab this version and install it on the Azure server right away, be prepared to run into rough edges. Being in the testing phase, the operating system isn’t fully baked yet, and several of its features are yet to be added to the operating system.
