Windows Server 2012 R2, codenamed "Windows Server 8.1" or "Windows Server Blue", is the seventh version of the

Windows Server Windows Server (formerly Windows NT Server) is a group of operating systems (OS) for servers that Microsoft has been developing since July 27, 1993. The first OS that was released for this platform was Windows NT 3.1 Advanced Server. With the r ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

, as part of the

Windows NT Windows NT is a proprietary graphical operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems sc ...

family of operating systems. It was unveiled on June 3, 2013 at

TechEd Microsoft Ignite is an annual conference for developers and IT professionals hosted by Microsoft. It has taken place in several locations around the world. The first conference, then known as TechEd, happened in 1993 in Orlando, Florida, United S ...

North America, and released on October 18 of the same year. It is the successor to the original

Windows Server 2012 Windows Server 2012, codenamed "Windows Server 8", is the sixth version of the Windows Server operating system by Microsoft, as part of the Windows NT family of operating systems. It is the server version of Windows based on Windows 8 and succe ...

, and is the Windows 8.1 derived

server Server may refer to: Computing *Server (computing), a computer program or a device that provides functionality for other programs or devices, called clients Role * Waiting staff, those who work at a restaurant or a bar attending customers and su ...

operating system to receive official support from Microsoft. A further update, formally designated Windows Server 2012 R2 Update, was released in April 2014. It is a cumulative set of security, critical and other updates. Windows Server 2012 R2 is derived from the

Windows 8.1 Windows 8.1 is a release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on August 27, 2013, and broadly released for retail sale on October 17, 2013, about a year after the retail release of its pre ...

codebase, and runs only on

x86-64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set, first released in 1999. It introduced two new modes of operation, 64-bit mode and compatibility mode, along with a new 4-level paging mod ...

processors (64-bit). Windows Server 2012 R2 was succeeded by

Windows Server 2016 Windows Server 2016 is the eighth release of the Windows Server server operating system developed by Microsoft as part of the Windows NT family of operating systems. It was developed concurrently with Windows 10 and is the successor to the Wind ...

, which is derived from the

Windows 10 Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It is the direct successor to Windows 8.1, which was released nearly two years earlier. It was released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on J ...

codebase.

Features

The following features are introduced in Windows Server 2012 R2: * Automated Tiering:

Storage Spaces The transition from Windows 7 to Windows 8 introduced a number of new features across various aspects of the operating system. These include a greater focus on optimizing the operating system for touchscreen-based devices (such as tablet compute ...

stores most frequently accessed files on fastest physical media * Deduplication for VHD: Reduces the storage space for VHD files with largely similar contents by storing the similar contents only once *

Windows PowerShell PowerShell is a task automation and configuration management program from Microsoft, consisting of a command-line shell and the associated scripting language. Initially a Windows component only, known as Windows PowerShell, it was made open-sourc ...

v4, which now includes a Desired State Configuration (DSC) feature * Integrated

Office 365 Microsoft 365 is a product family of productivity software, collaboration and cloud-based services owned by Microsoft. It encompasses online services such as Outlook.com, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, programs formerly marketed under the name Mic ...

support (Essentials edition) * User interface changes reflecting

, including visible

Start button The Start menu is a graphical user interface element used in Microsoft Windows since Windows 95 and in other operating systems. It provides a central launching point for computer programs and performing other tasks in the Windows shell. It is na ...

. *

UEFI UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is a set of specifications written by the UEFI Forum. They define the architecture of the platform firmware used for booting and its interface for interaction with the operating system. Examples of ...

-based virtual machines * Upgrades from driver emulators to synthetic hardware drivers to minimize legacy support * Faster VM deployment (approximately half the time) *

Internet Information Services Internet Information Services (IIS-pronounced 2S, formerly Internet Information Server) is an extensible web server software created by Microsoft for use with the Windows NT family. IIS supports HTTP, HTTP/2, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, SMTP and NNTP. ...

8.5: Support for logging to

Event Tracing for Windows Event Viewer is a component of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system that lets administrators and users view the event logs on a local or remote machine. Applications and operating-system components can use this centralized log service to repo ...

and the ability to log any request/response headers. To improve scalability, if IIS is configured with 100 or more web sites, by default it will not automatically start any of them. Alongside this, a new "Idle Worker Process Page-Out" configuration option has been added to application pools to instruct Windows to page-out the process if it has been idle for the idle time-out period (by default, 20 minutes). *

Server Message Block Server Message Block (SMB) is a communication protocol originally developed in 1983 by Barry A. Feigenbaum at IBM and intended to provide shared access to files and printers across nodes on a network of systems running IBM's OS/2. It also provides ...

: Performance and event logging quality improvements, support for Hyper-V Live Migration over SMB, bandwidth prioritization management, and the ability to remove SMB 1.0 support *

Windows Deployment Services Windows Deployment Services is a server technology from Microsoft for network-based installation of Windows operating systems. It is the successor to Remote Installation Services. WDS is intended to be used for remotely deploying Windows Vista, W ...

: Support for managing WDS via PowerShell. *

Windows Defender Microsoft Defender Antivirus (formerly Windows Defender) is an anti-malware component of Microsoft Windows. It was first released as a downloadable free anti-spyware program for Windows XP and was shipped with Windows Vista and Windows 7. It has ...

is available in a

Server Core Server Core is a minimalistic Microsoft Windows Server installation option, debuted in Windows Server 2008. Server Core provides a server environment with functionality scaled back to core server features, and because of limited features, it has ...

installation, and is installed and enabled by default. * IP Address Management (IPAM): Extended to support

role-based access control In computer systems security, role-based access control (RBAC) or role-based security is an approach to restricting system access to authorized users. It is an approach to implement mandatory access control (MAC) or discretionary access control ( ...

, allowing for fine-grained control over which users can view or change configurations for DHCP reservations, scopes, IP address blocks, DNS resource records, etc. Additionally, IPAM can integrate with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2 to have coordinated IP policy across both physical and virtual environments. The IPAM database can be stored in a SQL Server instance instead of

Windows Internal Database Windows Internal Database (codenamed WYukon, sometimes referred to as SQL Server Embedded Edition) is a variant of SQL Server Express 2005–2014 that is included with Windows Server 2008 (SQL 2005), Windows Server 2008 R2 (SQL 2005), Windows Server ...

. *

Group Policy Group Policy is a feature of the Microsoft Windows NT family of operating systems (including Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server 2003+) that controls the working environment of user accounts and computer accounts. G ...

has a new "Policy Cache" setting which allows domain-joined machines to store a copy of the group policy settings on the client machine and, depending on the speed of access to the domain controller, use those at startup time instead of waiting for the policy settings to download. This can improve startup times on machines that are disconnected from the company network. New Group Policy settings have been added to cover new features in

and

Internet Explorer 11 Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) is the eleventh, final, and now deprecated version of the Internet Explorer web browser. It was initially included in the release of Windows 8.1, Windows RT 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 on October 17, 2013, and was ...

, such as enabling/disabling SPDY/3 support, configuring start screen layouts, and detecting phone numbers in web pages. * TLS support is extended to support , "Transport Layer Security (TLS) Session Resumption without Server-Side State", which improves performance of long-running TLS-secured connections that need to reconnect due to session expiration. *

Hyper-V Microsoft Hyper-V, codenamed Viridian, and briefly known before its release as Windows Server Virtualization, is a native hypervisor; it can create virtual machines on x86-64 systems running Windows. Starting with Windows 8, Hyper-V superseded W ...

role and Hyper-V management console are added to the Essentials edition. *

Windows Server Update Services Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), previously known as Software Update Services (SUS), is a computer program and network service developed by Microsoft Corporation that enables administrators to manage the distribution of updates and hot ...

was made available for Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials edition. *

ReFS Resilient File System (ReFS), codenamed "Protogon", is a Microsoft proprietary file system introduced with Windows Server 2012 with the intent of becoming the "next generation" file system after NTFS. ReFS was designed to overcome problems tha ...

gained support for alternate data streams and automatic error-correction on parity spaces.

Editions

According to the Windows Server 2012 R2 datasheet published on May 31, 2013, there are four editions of this operating system: Foundation, Essentials, Standard and Datacenter. As with Windows Server 2012, the Datacenter and Standard editions are feature-identical, varying only based on licensing (particularly licensing of virtual instances). The Essentials edition has the same features as the Datacenter and Standard products, with some restrictions.

Features

Editions

See also

References

Further reading