WINDOWS SERVER 2012 R2

The following features are introduced in Windows Server 2012 R2:

• Automated Tiering: Storage Spaces stores most frequently accessed files on fastest physical media
• Deduplication for VHD: 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
• Integrated Office 365 support (Essentials edition)
• User interface changes reflecting Windows 8.1, including visible 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: 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