What benefits does Windows 8 Server offer?
Virtualization
It provides a complete platform that is dynamic and scalable to build a private cloud. Businesses incur less expense to build the cloud and secure the workstations.
The cloud service is capable of negotiating service level agreements with user agents, charge users based on usage and support self-service delivery.
Security is achieved through an identity management framework that ensures reliable and secure connectivity.
Performance
Service downtime has been highly reduced due to new and improved features and maximum efforts have been invested to contain the problem without disrupting the end users.
Workload management has been enhanced and virtualization process has been automated.
Scalability
With Windows 8 Server, you have the option to build applications for premise usage, cloud or hybrid environments using different tools and frameworks provided.
The same programming languages and technologies can be used by developers to develop applications seamlessly that can be used locally or on cloud.
It integrates Internet Information Services (IIS) and offers a platform for both open source technologies and ASP.NET to provide variety of choices for development.
Usability
You can access your work environment from any workstation through the connectivity services offered by Windows 8 Server.
Windows 8 Server is capable of adapting itself to changing network conditions and controls bandwidth usage based on network traffic.
Access policies can be defined on Windows 8 Server that control who has access to what data based on identity classification and administration.
Server management
The server manager in Windows 8 Server uses Metro interface and enables all servers to be managed through the Active Directory or DNS lookup.
The state of all servers linked with Active Directory can be viewed and some attributes can be modified based on permissions offered by that server.
Easy deployment
You can install roles and features as in Windows Server 2008 and target local, remote and virtual hard drives to dispatch operations. You can also install the server without a GUI since a real server has no associated GUI.
You do not need third party tools to track IP address allocations.
Windows 8 Server has an inbuilt IP address manager that incorporates network discovery, static and dynamic address allocation, DHCP and DNS monitor along with network auditing capabilities.
The IP manager also performs functions like address usage logging, conflict identification and managing a trail of all changes that have taken place in the network over a period.
Enhanced access control policies
 You can enforce access policies on who accesses what data from which terminal in Windows 8 Server.
Different users along with applications and the OS itself allocate tags to files. In cases where the user is denied access to a file, he/she can submit a help ticket to the administrator requesting file access.
Hyper-V Clusters
Windows 8 server is capable of running 63 hosts and as many as 4000 virtual machines in a cluster.
These clusters offer increased performance, availability, security, resource pooling, encryption. Data de-duplication and live storage migration.
Networking capabilities
You can have multiple virtual machines on a physical server and they can be setup to give the illusion of operating on different hardware on their own dedicated network.
The DHCP guard ensures that virtual machines do not expose their services to other machines on a different virtual network.]]>
