It brings along hundreds of enhancements compared to the previous release

Mar 6, 2012 12:40 GMT  ·  By

On February 29th, Microsoft made officially available for download the Beta version of its upcoming Windows 8 client

, currently up for grabs as Windows 8 Consumer Preview.

What went somehow unnoticed was the fact that the company released the beta flavor of its new Windows Server “8” the very next day, and that IT professionals can now head over to Microsoft’s website and download it.

The new Windows Server 8 version follows the availability of another pre-release flavor of the platform, which made it online in September last year. Overall, there are hundreds of improvements that the new Beta release of Windows Server “8” comes with.

The new OS iteration brings along a variety of enhancements when compared to the initial release, offering a glimpse at what is shaping up as what Microsoft is calling the cloud-optimized OS.

Some of these improvements include new Hyper-V features, meant to work together for building a multi-tenant platform for cloud computing.

“For example, with Hyper-V Network Virtualization you can create virtual networks so different business units, or even multiple customers, can seamlessly share network infrastructure,” Bill Laing, corporate vice president, Server and Cloud, explains.

“You will be able to move virtual machines and servers around without losing their network assignments.”

Additionally, the platform arrives with high availability and disaster recovery via software technology on cost effective hardware.

“For example, with File Server Transparent Failover you can now more easily perform hardware or software maintenance of nodes in a File Server cluster by moving file shares between nodes with little interruption to server applications that are storing data on those file shares,” Laing explains.

There are also a series of new features aimed at multi-machine management and automation, including enhancements brought to Server Manager and a new Windows PowerShell.

“With 2,300 commandlets provided out of the box, Windows PowerShell allows you to automate everything you can do manually with the user interface. And, with technologies like Intellisense, we’ve made it very easy for you to master all of that power,” Laing notes.

Windows Server “8” also arrives as a powerful server application platform aimed at offering support for the development and hosting of some of the most demanding application workloads.

Professionals can take advantage of .NET Framework 4.5, as well as of new asynch language and library support for coming up with server and web applications capable of scaling beyond what other platforms provide.

“Our new IIS 8 web server provides better security isolation and resource sand-boxing between applications, native support for web sockets, and the ability to host significantly more sites on a server,” Laing states.