Microsoft Releases Windows Server 2012 249
Barence writes "Microsoft has released Windows Server 2012, letting businesses test it for 90 days on the Azure cloud platform for free. There are two versions of the main edition of Windows Server 2012: one with virtualization support and one without. The former, the Data Center version, costs $4,809, while the Standard edition will cost $882. There's also an Essentials version, which replaces Small Business Server, for $501 per server, and Windows Server 2012 Foundation, which will only be available pre-installed on hardware."
Ars has a detailed look at the new edition.
Finally tried real pay-for-it microsoft support. (Score:2, Interesting)
3 days of grubbing around in the registry and it still doesn't work.
On the linux servers, The same task was done with 3 iptables lines.
including the "service iptables save" .
I was underwhelmed.
Re:WHAT!? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yet MS wonders why they have such a comparatively tiny market share of the server market...
You're kidding right??? Their server market share would have to be at or close to an all time high with a majority share.
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Interesting)
Haha.
On a serious note, though, you actually can run POSIX apps on Server 2012. NT has, since its inception, included support for POSIX APIs and filesystem behavior. These days it's called SUA (Subsystem for UNIX Applications) and a smallish but fully functional operating environment for it, called Interix, is available for free. The installer will also let you enable various tweaks such as SetUID/SetGID behavior and filesystem case sensitivity, things you can't get with Cygwin or the like. It's implemented as an NT subsystem, same as Win32, so the speed is basically native as well. Interix comes with a working build toolchain, plus you can get a package manager for a repository of precompiled software and updates from http://suacommunity.com./ [suacommunity.com.]
I'm not sure I'd advocate adopting it at this point if you haven't already - MS has been making moves toward discontinuing support for some years now, and it appears to no longer be in any of the client editions but Enterprise - but it exists, and it works. MS themselves used it to host Hotmail on Apache before they ported it to run on IIS. I use it (on client) both for various utilities that I prefer the POSIX versions of (git and ssh and such, plus sometimes there is no Win32 version) and for bash (my primary shell).
Re:frist (Score:5, Interesting)
I find backing up the registry in a fashion that allows me to easily restore configurations a real pain. NTBackup and it's descendants are hardly backup wonders. Configuration via text file is infinitely easier to deal with than binary hives.
I don't even bother restoring failed domain controllers any more. I have other DCs replicating AD data so I just build a new server, promote it to a DC and let replication do the heavy lifting. Hrlluva lot easier than what passes for bare metal recovery in the Windows world.
Re:frist (Score:5, Interesting)
For server functionality pure bullshit. I have a decade's experience running Windows and *nix servers, often in the same networks and while Windows has AD and GPOs to its benefit, in other respects it is horribly backwards and painful to use. Just backing up the system config in Windows is appallingly difficult compared to *nix.
So, how does Linux handle online backups of running server workloads? Does Linux have a way to signal to running services (like RDBMSs, hypervisors, file servers) that a backup is about to happen, negotiate which files are to be included in the backup and then in a fragment of a second work with the running service to synchronize disk content so that the backup will be consistent?
A running database server will almost invariably hold some state in memory. If the power is lost it will be able to rebuild from the disk state, but that can be a time consuming task. If the backup system is simplistic it will just back up the disk state of any file. Upon restoring it will appear as if the power was lost and the roll-forward log will have to be played.
A more advanced backup system will integrate with the services to ensure that for a very brief time (just enough to take a snapshot) the disk state is consistent and thus will not require a rebuild/roll forward if it is ever restored.
Windows comes with Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and a file system which supports block level snapshots. VSS works with VSS aware applications (VSS writers) such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database Server, Exchange Server, Active Directory, NTFS and Hyper-V server. When a service is a VSS writer it participates in VSS coordination/synchronization to create consistent disk state.
It even works through Hyper-V: When you back up the Hyper-V host, Hyper-V itself is a VSS writer which recursively invokes the VSS running inside guest OSes (if Windows) to ensure that any service inside the Hyper-V guest OS is also disk consistent exactly when a snapshot of the virtual hard disk image is created.
To my knowledge, Linux doesn't have anything like VSS. Which means that each application/service must be handled separately. Typically you will stop the service during the backup. Some services such as PostgreSQL can recover from a non-consistent disk image; others can not. Individual applications may have commands/services which allow admins to "dump" state to a file to be backed up separately. All in all reliably backing up a running Linux server is more complicated compared to backing up a running Windows server with VSS aware services.