Microsoft announced the release of Windows Server 2019 for the second half of 2018. The preview version of the product is already available to participants of the Windows Insider Program.
When developing Windows Server 2019, special attention was paid to the fields of hybridization, security, a platform for applications and a hyper-converged infrastructure.
Security is one of the critical moments for any infrastructure, and the fact that Windows Server 2019 developers improved the mechanism of protected virtual machines, which was introduced in the version of Windows Server 2016, is very encouraging.
In addition to increasing access control for administrators, the function of the protected virtual machine now includes support for virtual Linux machines. The capabilities of VMConnect will also expand to improve the process of eliminating the errors of protected virtual machines for Windows Server and Linux. And as the cherry on the cake, in addition to the above, the developers have added the function of Encrypted Networks, which with one click allows administrators to protect the network layer between servers.
Continuing the security theme, Windows Server 2019 will please us with the introduction of the Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) functionality, which, among other things, will provide proactive protection, detect attacks and find zero-day vulnerabilities. The functionality allows users to gain access to monitoring the core and memory at a deep level, improves performance and protection against unauthorized access, and also activates the possibility of responses on server machines.
By focusing on the needs of application developers who are modernizing their existing applications using containers, the Windows Server team plans to reduce the size of the Server Core base container image to a third of the current size of 5 GB, which will reduce the download time by 72%. In addition, Windows Server 2019 will contain an improved version of Windows Subsystem on Linux (WSL) to help Linux users transfer their scripts to Windows using industry standards such as OpenSSH, Curl & Tar. Also, Windows Server 2019 will have significant improvements for working with components of a Kubernetes cluster.
Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) is one of the newest trends in the server industry at the moment. According to IDC, the HCI market grew by 64% in 2016 and Gartner claims that by 2019 the market will reach $ 5 billion. This trend is primarily due to the fact that users understand the value of using x86 servers with high-performance local disks to perform their computing and storage tasks. In addition, HCI provides the flexibility to easily scale such solutions.
Users searching for HCI solutions by far can use the stable version of Windows Server 2016 on Host-Telecom.com equipment from vendors certified by Microsoft in order to achieve the best price-quality ratio of the HCI solution. With this approach, Windows Server 2019, in turn, will add scale, performance, and reliability.