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Virtual environments in Windows Server
Virtual Windows
Since the first version of Windows NT more than 20 years ago, Microsoft has pursued its goal of providing a unified operating system for clients and servers. In the next generation of Windows, Redmond has expanded this concept: From the embedded computer on smartphones and tablets to PCs and servers for large and small companies, the Windows kernel is intended to be a universal system. Microsoft addresses larger environments with the new Windows Server edition. The preview versions pay particular attention to new features for virtualization and storage capabilities.
The development roadmap for the server operating system largely corresponds to that of its sibling Windows 10: At least one more intermediate version is expected in Spring 2015. The finished product has been announced for late Summer 2015. As always, Microsoft's contract customers with volume licenses will have first access to the new bits and bytes through the web distribution. Single versions on media will be available a few weeks later.
An overview of new features in Windows Server 2016 is available online [1], but here, I want to take a look at the details of support for Hyper-V and Docker containers unveiled shortly after the release of the Technical Preview [2].
Virtual Containers with Docker
A virtualization container behaves similarly to a virtual machine (VM). Unlike conventional VMs, however, a container shares most of the server resources with all other containers and processes running on the server. Thus, the container is not an encapsulated virtual machine with its own memory, virtual disks, and virtual hardware resources such as CPU and network cards, and it does not run its own instance of the operating system.
Container virtualization is based on strict isolation of
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