Windows Server 2016

[Howell]

What's new in Windows Server 2016 Storage - Technical Preview
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt126161.aspx

Storage Spaces Direct and Storage Replica look the most interesting to me.
The nano server might make a decent NAS. Dedup is included.

 

[CougTek]

Unless I'm mistaken, deduplication takes a lot of RAM in Server 2012 R2. I hope it improved in Server 2016.

I need to find a server to test this.

 

[Mercutio]

These are the components I'm most interested in using. I have a system deployment that I'm kind of dragging my feet on so that I get 2016 licenses rather than 2012r2 and actually use the new features.
I will say that 2012r2 has significant improvements (software RAID6) over plain old 2012.

 

[CougTek]

I've almost forgotten, but it's also the beginning of containers on the Windows Server platform. That should allow much higher server density if well implemented.

 

[CougTek]

I've configured a virtual volume with auto-tiering, using Storage Spaces, on Windows Server 2012 R2 today. I hope there won't be moronic issues like this one in the 2016 version :

That's strong, Microsoft. For the record, changing the scale to GB and setting the volume size to the maximum available space fixed the issue. Still.

 

[Mercutio]

Storage Spaces has a LOT of weirdness like that. Things that have to fixed with cmdlets in Powershell because the GUI doesn't work or isn't implemented. It's fairly aggravating, though the actual storage is robust enough.