A couple of decades ago, Microsoft was the kaiju of network computing. First came MS-DOS, and Windows soon followed. Each simply took over business desktops. Before Novell knew what hit it, Windows was then infused with the DNA of OS/2 and became Windows NT and in turn NT Server. Novell had dominated the early PC networking market, but by the end of the 1990s the company was a shadow of its former self.

Like a special breed of kaiju, Microsoft's server platform keeps on mutating, incorporating the DNA of its competitors in sometimes strange ways. All the while, Microsoft's offering has constantly grown in its scope, creating variants of itself in the process. Godzilla often retreats, battered after battle, to regenerate, and the monster has spawned multiple variants (Roland Emmerich's 'Zilla is the Microsoft Bob of Godzillas, right?). Windows Server has done the same, coming back again and again to disrupt another server market with a snap of its 80-percent-functionality-for-20-percent-of-cost teeth.

In 2016, it's happening again. Microsoft Windows Server 2016 picks up where its predecessor (Server 2012 R2) left off three years ago. The last release of Server strove to elevate the status of Microsoft's server platform. It went from being an also-ran in the movement from on-premises servers to an increasingly virtualized, cloud-based enterprise to being integral to business cloud computing itself. With four different versions (Essentials, Hyper-V Server, Standard, and Datacenter), three different deployment schemes ("Desktop experience," Core, and Nano), and an ever-expanding collection of optional features, Server 2016 wants to be everything for everyone. It's a heavyweight virtualization hypervisor! It's a lithe cloud application container! It's a high performance storage platform! It's a hardened security platform!

Though, just as our favorite giant monsters are continually misunderstood by the masses, Windows Server 2016 is not likely to be universally embraced. In many ways Server 2016 is late to the party started by other data center kaiju—Linux has offered container virtualization for years, and VMWare already offers virtual storage area networking.

One programming note

But Server 2016's take on each of its roles is fairly solid and (relatively) easy to use compared to the alternatives—especially if you've already got PowerShell veterans around. Thanks to the battle scars Microsoft took in using Server for its own Azure cloud service, Server 2016 now challenges or exceeds the capabilities of its primary virtualization rivals. In other words, it's good enough to do most of what people are doing right now at Windows prices. Server 2016 is not going to quickly dislodge any incumbent vendors from existing data centers, but it will give people with a somewhat smaller budget the sort of capabilities that used to cost a whole lot more.

There's no way to fully explore Server 2016 in a single article, so this is not intended as a full review of the platform. Rather, this serves as an extended first look based on technical preview releases. And because Server 2016 builds so heavily on the big shift made by its two most recent predecessors, Server 2012 and Server 2012 R2, I'm not going to dwell on the cosmetics and basic features of the platform. Based on the early look I had, there have been no significant changes in the graphical user interface of Server other than a little Windows 10 desktop remodeling.





Instead, my focus centers on the significant changes under the hood and some of the most important enhancements to existing features. With this goal in mind, I performed two sets of evaluations. The first was in a virtualized lab running on Azure and set up by Microsoft (recognizable in screenshots by the Contoso domain name) to get some familiarity with key new features. The second evaluation was more free-form on my own lab server farm, in which I set up an on-premises network for the fictional Monster Island Incorporated (where all the admins are kaiju) to get a better feel for the overall evolution of the platform and how well it plays with others. In the on-premises test, I ran a mix of Server 2016 hosts across physical and virtualized systems.

There are some aspects of the OS that I could not fully test in time for this review, either because of a lack of support for them in the Technical Preview 5 version of Server 2016 that I used for our first look or because I didn't have enough time and budget to scale up to a size where the features made sense (as with some of the new software-defined networking features). Ars will be evaluating those features once we have the final release in hand and can properly put it through its paces—both on premises and in the cloud.

Scaling up the beast

To fully enjoy the capabilities of Server 2016—that is, with all the many new things that depend on Microsoft's latest Hyper-V hypervisor code—you will need a server with an Intel or AMD processor compatible with the x64 instruction set. It must also include support for Second Level Address Translation virtualization (EPT on Intel and Nested Paging Tables on AMD). And while it's possible to run Server 2016 in its most minimal, GUI-less forms in 512 megabytes of RAM, you'll need at least 2 gigabytes to boot up the "Desktop Experience." Additionally, you'll need a minimum of 32 gigabytes of disk on a SATA or SCSI controller to boot a physical server, plus at least one PCI Express gigabit Ethernet adapter.

Older systems will still run Server 2016 adequately without virtualization. To check, I ran it briefly on Monster Island's "legacy" Dell PowerEdge 2950, the evil twin of the machine that was Hillary Clinton's basement e-mail server. But for those looking to scale up, Windows Server 2016 is much beefier than its predecessors (something we didn't have the hardware budget to test):