Posted on October 28, 2014 at 6:56 PM

Which Windows OS to use for your server – Windows 2012 R2

As of April 2014, the most recent versions of Windows for personal computers, smartphones, server computers and embedded devices are respectively Windows 8.1, Windows Phone 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Embedded 8.

Windows Server 2012 R2
The current version Windows Server 2012 R2 was released on October 18, 2013. According to Windows, there are four editions of this operating system: Foundation, Essentials, Standard and Datacenter. It has advanced features compared to Windows Server 2012. Automated Tiering functions to provide storage spaces stores most frequently accessed files on fastest physical media. Deduplication for VHD that reduces the storage space for VHD files with largely similar contents by storing the similar contents only once. Windows PowerShell v4, which now includes a Desired State Configuration (DSC) feature like Integrated Office 365 support (Essentials edition), Return of the Windows Start button, UEFI-based virtual machines, Upgrades from driver emulators to synthetic hardware drivers to minimize legacy support, Faster VM deployment (approximately half the time).

Internet Information Services 8.5 support for logging to Event Tracing for Windows and the ability to log any request/response headers. To improve scalability, if IIS is configured with 100 or more web sites, by default it will not automatically start any of them. Alongside this, a new “Idle Worker Process Page-Out” configuration option has been added to application pools to instruct Windows to page-out the process if it has been idle for the idle time-out period (by default, 20 minutes).
Server Message Block also Performance and event logging quality improvements, support for Hyper-V Live Migration over SMB, bandwidth prioritization management, and the ability to remove SMB 1.0 support. Windows Deployment Services supports for managing WDS via PowerShell.