Microsoft Virtualization Secrets

Exploring the Core Infrastructure Service Enhancements

For many organizations, Windows Server 2012 means a hugely improved version of Hyper-V, but it offers much more than that, and in this section you learn about some of the other features that make it a great cloud platform for many different use cases, including multi-tenant environments. The material presented here is by no means exhaustive, but rather an overview of the best parts at a very high level.

Active Directory

Fine-grained password policies required the use of the very unfriendly ADSIEdit tool to create and use policies, and PowerShell had to be used to restore a deleted object from the recycle bin. Not popular!

Active Directory has become the directory service standard for many of today’s organizations and is a requirement for almost every Microsoft service and many third-party services. First introduced in Windows 2000, the now renamed Active Directory Domain Services (ADDS) has evolved from strength to strength, providing robust authentication and authorization capabilities in addition to a very powerful directory service. One of its weaknesses has been its complexity in terms of implementation, upgrade, and using some features. For example, upgrading ADDS prior to Windows Server 2012 meant running multiple domain and forest preparations on different domain controllers with different accounts. Great features were added to ADDS—such as fine-grained password policies that enabled defining and assigning different ...