Windows 2012 ReFS

Despite the many advantages NTFS offers over early FAT file systems, it’s been around since 1993, and Windows aficionados have been longing for a new file system for quite some time. Way back in 2004, we were eagerly looking forward to WinFS, but Vista disappointed us by not including it. Likewise, there was speculation early on that a new file system would be introduced with Windows 7, but it didn’t happen.

Windows Server 2012 brings us our long-awaited new file system, ReFS or the Resilient File System. It supports many of the same features as NTFS, although it leaves behind some others, perhaps most notably file compression, EFS, and disk quotas. In return, ReFS gives us data verification and auto correction, and it’s designed to work with Storage Spaces to create shrinkable/expandable logical storage pools. The new file system is all about maximum scalability, supporting up to 16 exabytes in practice. (This is the theoretical maximum in the NTFS specifications, but in the real world, it’s limited to 16 terabytes.) ReFS supports a theoretical limit of 256 zetabytes (more than 270 billion terabytes). That allows for a lot of scaling.

2012 VDI

Windows Terminal Services has come a long way, baby, since I first met it in Windows NT TS Edition. Renamed Remote Desktop Services, it has expanded to encompass much more than the ability to RDP into the desktop of a remote machine. Microsoft offered a centralized Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution in Windows Server 2008 R2, but it was still a little rough around the edges. Significant improvements have been made in Server 2012.

You no longer need a dedicated GPU graphics card in the server to use RemoteFX, which vastly improves the quality of graphics over RDP. Instead, you can use a virtualized GPU on standard server hardware. USB over RDP is much better, and the Fair Share feature can manage how CPU, memory, disk space, and bandwidth are allocated among users to thwart bandwidth hogs. Read more about Server 2012 VDI and RDP improvements here.

SMB 3.0

The Server Message Block (SMB) protocol has been significantly improved in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8. The new version of SMB supports new file server features, such as SMB transparent failover , SMB Scale Out, SMB Multichannel, SMB Direct, SMB encryption, VSS for SMB file sharing, SMB directory leasing, and SMB PowerShell. That’s a lot of bang for the buck. It works beautifully with Hyper-V, so that VHD files and virtual machine configuration files can be hosted on SMB 3.0 shares. A SQL system database can be stored on an SMB share, as well, with improvements to performance. For more details about what’s new in SMB 3.0, see this blog post.

Storage

SAS is an extremely versatile technology that can be found in many different locations, including inside servers (SAS SSD and HDDs), PCIe SAS RAID cards and host bus adapters (HBAs), SAS expanders and switches, storage enclosures, and in storage systems.