Overview
Lenovo offers Windows Server 2019 and Windows Server 2016 so organizations can leverage best in class Lenovo Servers to build agile IT infrastructure that is reliable, secure, and high-performing. Windows Server 2019 is the latest Operating System from Microsoft and improves datacenter security, offers unprecedented hyperconverged infrastructure, allows for faster application innovation—all on a unique hybrid datacenter platform.
Enhanced Security Capabilities
For IT professionals, security and compliance is a primary concern. Windows Server 2019 provides capabilities to build high security datacenter environments.
Manage privileged identities. Many breaches can be prevented by protecting administrator credentials. Windows Server 2019 ensure that all apps and system components have just enough access privilege.
Secure the operating system. Discover and address security breaches with integrated Windows Defender Advanced Threat Detection. Help prevent host intrusion with Windows Defender Exploit Guard, which locks down devices against a wide variety of attack vectors and blocks behaviors commonly used in malware attacks.
Secure virtualization fabric. Protect VM workloads from unauthorized access, with Shielded Virtual Machines for Windows Server or Linux workloads. Add another layer of protection for network traffic to and from a VM with Encrypted Subnets.
Hybrid platform
Extending Active Directory, synchronizing file servers, and backup in the cloud are just a few examples of what customers are already doing today to extend their datacenters to the public cloud.
In addition, a hybrid approach also allows for apps running on-premises to take advantage of innovation in the cloud such as Artificial Intelligence and IoT. Hybrid cloud enables a future-proof, long-term approach – which is exactly why we see it playing a central role in cloud strategies for the foreseeable future.
Storage migration service— helps to inventory and migrate data, security, and configurations from old legacy systems to Windows Server 2019 and/or Azure.
Synchronizing file servers to Azure— centralize your organization's file shares in Azure Files while keeping the flexibility, performance, and compatibility of an on-premises file server.
System insights— brings local predictive analytics capabilities native to Windows Server. These predictive capabilities, each backed by a machine-learning model, locally analyze Windows Server system data to provide high-accuracy predictions that help reduce the operational expenses associated with reactively managing Windows Server instances.
Azure network adaptor— easily connects to Azure virtual networks. Windows Admin Center performs the heavy lifting of configuring the VPN to a new network adapter that will connect Windows Server 2019 to a point-to-site Azure virtual network VPN.
Enhanced AD authentication— Windows Server 2019 will be able to join Active Directory, enabling new scenarios in which the computer account can be used for authentication.
VM protection— replicates workloads running on physical and virtual machines (VMs) from a primary site to a secondary location.
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI): HCI is one of the latest trends in the server industry today. Organizations are embracing the trend for cost and performance reasons. They understand the value of using x86 servers with high performant local disks to run their compute and storage needs at the same time. In addition, HCI gives the flexibility to easily scale such deployments.
In hyper-converged deployments, compute, storage, and networking are on the same cluster, simplifying configuration and reducing hardware costs.
Unified management— Windows Admin Center is an elegant browser-based HCI remote management interface that includes software-defined network configuration and monitoring.
Storage space— protect your data from drive failures and extend storage over time as you add drives to your servers.
Enhanced storage spaces direct— build software-defined storage using industry standard servers with local storage that can scale up to 1PB per storage pool in Windows Server 2016 and 4PB per storage pool and 64TB per volume in Windows Server 2019.
Mirror-accelerated parity— lets you create volumes that are part mirror and part parity for 2x better performance on storage spaces direct deployments. Writes land first in the mirrored portion and are gradually moved into the parity portion.
Storage class memory—support for new generation of server hardware including storage class memory, which drastically improves performance for server applications.
Supports USB thumb drive (as cluster witness)— support for USB thumb drive as cluster witness allowing true 2 node HCI deployments, with no additional dependencies.
Storage replica— provides storage-agnostic, block-level, synchronous replication between servers for disaster recovery, and allows stretching of a failover cluster for high availability.
Storage Quality of Service (QoS)— uses policies to define and monitor storage input/output minimums and maximums for VMs to enable consistent performance across VMs.
Data deduplication— provides volume savings of up to 90% by storing duplicate files on a volume once using logical pointers.
Virtual machine storage resiliency— provides intelligent means to retain virtual-machine session states to minimize the impact of minor storage disruptions.
Azure Witness for cluster— enables Azure blob storage as a witness in a quorum for a stretched cluster. Additionally, in Windows Server 2019 you can now create a file share witness that does not utilize the Cluster Name Object (CNO), but simply uses a local user account on the server the FSW is connected to.
Storage health monitoring— provides continuous monitoring, reporting, and maintenance to support storage spaces direct.
Cluster-wide monitoring— monitors memory and CPU usage, storage capacity, IOPS, throughput, and latency in real-time with clear alerts when something's not right.
Cluster sets— allows you to create clusters of greater flexibility without sacrificing resiliency.
Cluster OS rolling upgrade— enables an administrator to seamlessly upgrade the operating system of nodes in a failover cluster from Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Server 2016 to Windows Server 2019.
Mixed OS mode cluster— enables Windows Server 2012 R2 cluster nodes to operate with Windows Server 2016 nodes.
Site-aware failover clusters— groups nodes in stretched clusters based on physical location, enhancing key cluster-lifecycle operations such as failover behavior, placement policies, heart-beating between nodes, and quorum behaviour.
Kernel soft reboot— provides WSSD-validated hardware faster reboot time, reducing application downtime.
Persistent memory support— persistent memory (PM) technology provides byte-level access to non-volatile media while also reducing the latency of storing or retrieving data significantly.
Linux and FreeBSD workloads— enables most of the Windows Server software-defined datacenter features for Linux and FreeBSD guests running on Hyper-V for increased functionality, performance, and manageability.
Hot add and remove for disk, memory and network— add or remove a network adapter and adjust the amount of memory assigned while the VM is running, without any interruption. The memory adjustment capability works even when you have dynamic memory turned on for a Hyper-V host.
Network controller— provides a centralized, programmable point of automation to manage, configure, monitor, and troubleshoot virtualized network infrastructure in your datacenter.
Virtual networking— helps create network overlays on top of a shared multi-tenant physical fabric.
Software load balancer (SLB)— a cloud-optimized Layer 3 and Layer 4 load balancer that provides both North-South and East-West load balancing.
Virtual network peering— provides high speed connectivity between two virtual networks. Traffic between the virtual networks goes through the underlying fabric network with no gateway. Both virtual networks must be part of the same datacenter stamp.
Distributed firewall and micro-segmentation— dynamically segments networks based on evolving security or application needs using a stateful firewall and network security groups.
Hybrid SDN gateways— multi-tenanted, highly available gateways that connect customer virtual networks to Azure, other Windows Server-powered clouds, high speed WANs, and local non-virtualized resources.
Improved SDN gateway— improvements up to 3x for GRE tunnels and IPSec site-to-site VPN.
Converged RDMA— converge RDMA storage traffic and tenant Ethernet traffic on the same underlying NIC team for significant cost savings, while also getting the desired throughput and quality of service.
IP address management (IPAM) and DNS— IPAM now supports comprehensive DNS and DHCP management with role-based access control across multiple AD forests. DNS provides for traffic management, load balancing, split-brain deployments, and prevention of DNS amplification attacks.
MultiPoint services role— enables low cost-per-seat by allowing multiple users to run their own sessions while connected to one machine.
RDS RemoteFX vGPU— provides a rich desktop remoting experience (up to 4k) by allowing multiple VMs to share the same physical GPU for graphics acceleration.
High-availability RDS connection broker— helps create a fault-tolerance connection broker for Remote Desktop scenarios.
SDN IPv4/ IPv6 support— software defined networking (SDN) provides a method to centrally configure and manage physical and virtual network devices. Additionally, Windows Server 2019 now supports IPv6 addressing as well.
Deduplication for ReFS— data deduplication is now supported on ReFS to optimize free space on a volume by examining the data for duplicated portions.
Faster innovation for applications
Both developers and operations need a modern platform that helps them deliver innovation at the rate of changing business demands. Windows Server 2019 meets the needs of developers and IT operations that want to support fast innovation with improved support for containers and Linux.
Modernize apps faster with container support—Windows Server 2019 delivers a smaller Server Core container image for speedier download and offers enhanced support for compute, storage, and networking of Kubernetes clusters and the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.
Improve Linux operations— Building on previous support to run Linux and Windows containers side by side, Windows Server 2019 reduces complexity by enabling developers to use standard tools such as Open SSH, Curl, and Tar.
Linux containers— Linux containers allow application admins to manage both Windows and Linux applications on the same environment, reducing the management overhead.
Windows Server containers— creates an isolated application environment, in which you can run an application without fear of changes due to applications or configuration.
Server Core base container image— reduced Server Core Server base container image will reduce download time and further optimize the development time and performance.
Nano Server base container image— reduced Nano Server base container image will reduce download time and further optimize the development time and performance. For Windows Server 2016, Nano Server base container image optimization is available with semi-annual channel updates, whereas this capability comes with Windows Server 2019 out of the box.
Server Core Features on Demand— Features on Demand (FoD) significantly improve the app compatibility of Windows Server Core by including a set of binaries and packages from Windows Server with Desktop without adding any of the Windows Server Desktop GUI or Windows 10 GUI experiences.
Kubernetes platform support— Kubernetes platform support with major improvements to computing, storage, and networking components.
Group Managed Service Accounts (gMSA)— provides a single identity solution for services running on a server farm, or on systems behind network load balancer. Using a gMSA, services or service administrators do not need to manage password synchronization between service instances.
In Windows Server 2019, gMSA improves the scalability and reliability of containers to access network resources.
Windows Subsystem on Linux— Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) allows developers and application administrators to use tools in Linux environments alongside Command Prompt and PowerShell.
Hyper-V isolation— provides a highly isolated container environment in which the host operating system cannot be affected in any way by any other running container.
Azure Service Fabric for Windows Server— enables you to create a multi-machine Azure Service Fabric cluster in your own datacenter or in other public clouds.
PowerShell 5.1— provides enhanced scripting capabilities for configuration, management, and deployment of software-defined datacenter components.
PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC)— provides a set of PowerShell language extensions and cmdlets to declaratively specify how you want your software environment to be configured.
Visual Studio Code— supports development operations such as debugging, task running, and version control to provide the tools a developer needs for a quick code-build-debug cycle.
NET Core— helps create modern web apps, microservices, libraries, and console applications that run on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
