Windows Server 2012 Essentials

[ChileanLlama]

The replacement for Small Business Server 2011 Essentials and Windows Home Server 2011 now released to manufacturing, and available for evaluation.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/arch...facturing-available-for-evaluation-today.aspx

I've been running this through beta and RC and it's looking good. If you're familiar with WHS2011 it's not changed significantly, but does have the Storage Spaces ability.

Downside is that it's quite expensive at estimated $400-500 so probably won't appeal to many. Also it doesn't allow you to manually install many of Server 2012 roles, notably Hyper-V and WSUS.

 

[jake108]

I had taken a look at this for someone in the RC. The added licenses are good or due lack of need for CALS (specific client CALS of course). It does have several areas of concern, primarily lack of Hyper-V and considering its cost you can get cheaper copies of Windows Server 2008 Standard for roughly the same price which have more features, minus CALS.

SBS 2011 although end of life is similar but includes Exchange and costs around the same.

Not yet decided on storage spaces, time will tell of course. It is really a mixed bag because you could say its in ideal price range with features but Microsoft is already selling products aimed at that market at roughly the same cost with a lot of feature overlap.

The way I see it is Microsoft wants to discontinue SBS series, remove Exchange and push more customers / businesses to the cloud Office 365. Still there is cost / feature overlap which to be honest - is more confusing than anything Microsoft has done before in the server market.

Not sure what you think about its feature set but the way it is at the moment, it kind of completes with itself too with Windows Server 2012 Foundation. It just seems rather confusing Foundation even exists, although I understand from blogs on the subject that is to stop businesses deploying Linux on fresh first business server lineups and is for OEM only.