Just want to keep you all up to date on our progress with Server 2012 testing: We’ve acquired some more hardware to continue our evaluation of Server 2012. Our lab environment includes two servers connected to a shared external SAS drive array, which allows for expansion of disk storage and server failover. Each server runs Windows Server 2012 Datacenter edition, and shares the disks in a pool between the servers.
One of the most exciting features promised by Server 2012 is automatic server failover of virtual machine (Hyper-V) servers. We’ll get to that in a future edition, but for now our evaluation has focused on the storage layer.
One of the most exciting things about Server 2012 is Storage Spaces. This new feature adds a lot of function to how the operating system can interact with and manipulate storage. It adds a virtual layer to provide high availability and clustering features with fewer hardware requirements. There are some *technology* requirements, though; it won’t turn your ancient server into a powerhouse, but it allows a level of leeway that result in configurations that don’t require identical hardware as has been required in the past. What you get is larger capacity, more redundancy, and easily scalable storage.