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Hi, my name is David Fabritius, a Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft, and I work
in the Windows Server group, and today I'd like to talk to you about a couple of new
deployment options that we have in Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials.
So a couple of things we've done is to implement what used to be the unique features of Essential,
as a role in all of the editions of Windows Server. The second thing we've done is to
change it so you can now implement Essentials as a virtual machine without having to buy
or obtain any other software.
So the first thing I want to talk a little bit more about is the new Windows Server Essentials
experience role that you'll see in all the editions of Windows Server. So, this gives
a lot more flexibility in where, and how, and when, what used to be unique features
of Essentials, and before that SBS, can be deployed into different customer environments.
We still have the Essentials edition, which is specifically designed to work in small
business environments with up to 25 users and 50 devices. But now, when you use Windows
Server Standard or Datacenter edition, you'll also see this role available that you can
optionally turn on, and when you do that you can use the different feature sets: the dashboard
for simplified administration which may be useful in branch offices, Remote Web Access,
which provides very simple remote access for users to come in, access shared folders, to access
desktops, laptops that may be running in the office, as well as the client PC back up which
is a very popular feature of Windows Server Essentials. All those are now available in
the other editions as well. So we really look forward to seeing customers get a lot of value
when they purchase Windows Server Standard and use the Windows Server Essentials Experience
role.
Now, just as a deployment scenario, that we have around running the Standard edition,
you can see that like we've had in 2012, continuing in 2012 R2 you can have up to two virtual
instances of Windows Server when you buy one copy of Windows Server Standard. So as an
example, in the first virtual instance, you can run an operating system with the Essentials
Experience role turned on, and that will be able to act as kind of that core infrastructure server,
so giving you Active Directory, and DNS, as well as those previously unique features like
I was talking about, PC backup and the dashboard and so on. But that leaves you with a second
server instance that you can use for other workloads. So, things like SQL Server or Line-of-Business
applications, or if you wanted to run RDS and provide for virtual desktop, or even Exchange
Server that you want to run on premise. Any of those things are possible in that second
edition. So we see this as a very flexible way then to deploy Windows Server in your
environments.
Now the last thing I wanted to just briefly touch on was the idea of being able to do
virtualized deployments with just the Windows Server Essentials edition. So again, we still
have all of the different editions in the Windows Server family, now we have that Essentials
Experience as a role that crosses over them, but we still have for those small businesses,
a very cost effective, very simple, way to deploy the Windows Server Essentials. What's
new here is that now you can deploy it as a virtual machine. So, in the past, you could
run the Essentials edition as a virtual machine, but you would need to have Hyper-V software
from some other source. So you could either use Windows Server Standard as an example,
or you could use the free Microsoft Hyper-V server, which you would have to download separately.
But none of that is necessary with 2012 R2, you can now go ahead and virtualize using
just the Essentials edition itself.
So, just a couple of very exciting new deployment options that we have with Windows Server 2012
R2. Thank you for watching this edition of Coffee Coaching, and we hope you join us for
future videos.