United States   Change   |   All Microsoft Sites

Home

Microsoft Home  |  Servers and Tools  

Scalability and Reliability

Windows Server 2008 R2 is capable of unprecedented workload size, dynamic scalability, and across-the-board availability and reliability. A host of new and updated features contribute to this, including:

  • Leveraging Sophisticated CPU Architectures

    Windows Server 2008 R2 is the first Windows operating system to be offered for only 64-bit processors. With customers being unable to purchase a 32-bit server CPU for over two years, the performance and reliability advantages to moving to this architecture were too beneficial to ignore. Additionally, Windows Server 2008 R2 now supports up to 256 logical processor cores for a single operating system instance. Hyper-V virtual machines are able to address up to 64 logical processors in the host processor pool.

     

    Hyper-V R2 also includes a new Processor Compatibility feature. Processor compatibility allows you to move a virtual machine up and down multiple processor generations from the same vendor. When a VM is started with processor compatibility mode enabled, Hyper-V normalizes the processor feature set and only exposes guest visible processor features that are available on all Hyper-V enabled processors of the same processor architecture, i.e., AMD or Intel. This allows the VM to be migrated to any hardware platform of the same processor architecture. Processor features are "hidden" by the hypervisor by intercepting a VM's CPUID instruction and clearing the returned bits corresponding to the hidden features.

Windows Server 2008 R2 Scalability
  • Increased operating system componentization

    Microsoft introduced the concept of server roles to allow server administrators to quickly and easily configure any Windows-based server to run a specific set of tasks and remove extraneous OS code from system overhead. Windows Server 2008 R2 further extends this model with support for more roles and a broadening of current role support, like the addition of ASP.NET within IIS 7.0. Roles have been refined and feature sets redefined as customers have expressed desires for certain capabilities in popular scenarios. The Server Core installation option is an appropriate mention here with new (and much demanded) support for PowerShell scripting made possible by the addition of the .NET Framework to the list of server roles supported in the Server Core installation option.

  • Improved performance and scalability for applications and services

    Another key design goal was to provide higher performance for Windows Server 2008 R2 running on the same system resources as previous versions of Windows Server. In addition, Windows Server 2008 R2 supports increased scaling capabilities that allow you to support greater workloads than ever before. Windows Server 2008 R2 features that improve performance and scalability for applications and services.

    Learn More

  • Improved Storage Solutions

    The ability to quickly access information is more critical today than ever before. The foundation for this high-speed access is based on file services and network attached storage (NAS). Microsoft storage solutions are at the core of providing high-performance and highly available file services and NAS.  The release version of Windows Server 2008 introduced many improvements in storage technologies. Windows Server 2008 R2 includes additional improvements that enhance the performance, availability, and manageability of storage solutions.

    Learn More

  • Improved Protection of Intranet Resources

    The Network Policy Server (NPS) is a Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) server and proxy and Network Access Protection (NAP) health policy server. NPS evaluates system health for NAP clients, provides RADIUS authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA), and provides RADIUS proxy functionality.

    Learn More