Yesterday Microsoft held a big event in New York, where they made a number of announcements ranging from the Surface Products to the availability of Windows 10 v1809 and more. But the team back at the office was also up to something yesterday. Last week at Ignite, they had announced Windows Server 2019 – a new hybrid, security, application platform, and hyper-converged infrastructure capabilities of the same. And today, they have announced that Windows Server 2019 is now available for the public to download.
Features of Windows Server 2019
Some of the newest features and innovations are bought to Windows Server 2019 in the following 4 areas-
Hybrid: Hybrid brings along on-premise as well as cloud environments together. It is built into Windows Server 2019 as well as Windows Admin Center. Customers can now use hybrid features like Azure Backup, Azure File Sync, disaster recovery as well as Storage Migration Services.
Security: Microsoft is now following a 3 fold approach to enhance the security on Windows Server 2019. They are Protect, Detect and Respond. They said,
“On the Protect front, we had previously introduced Shielded VMs to protect sensitive virtualized workloads such as Domain Controllers, PCI data, sensitive healthcare, and financial data among others. In Windows Server 2019, we extended support of Shielded VMs to Linux VMs. On the Detect and Respond front, we enabled Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), that detects attacks and zero-day exploits among other capabilities.”
Also with Defender Exploit Guard, you can immune your systems from Ransomware attacks.
Application Platform: A smaller container image size is implemented here. This will significantly improve the experiences of developers and IT Professionals who use these containers to Modernize their existing applications.
Hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI): Microsoft democratized HCI in Windows Server 2019 with cost-effective high-performance software-defined storage and networking. This will directly allow deployments to scale from small 2-node servers to all the way to 100s of servers.
Download Windows Server 2019
For customers with a valid Software Assurance, this new version of Windows Server 2019 can be downloaded from the Volume Licensing Service Center (VLSC) here.
For those people who want to give it a try before they make any final calls, they can get the evaluation copy from the Evaluation Center here.
The customers who run Windows Server in Microsoft’s Cloud Service called Azure, they can also give Windows Server 2019 a try in the Azure Marketplace here.
The team has also announced that Windows Server 2019 will be available for the customers with a Visual Studio Subscription (formerly MSDN or Microsoft Developer Network) later this October of 2018 here. Along with it is available in Visual Studio subscription, it will also be available on the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) here.
If you wish to learn more about Windows Server 2019, you can refer to the official documentation here.
If you wish to upgrade to this latest release from an older version, you can check out the new Upgrade Center here.
If you are on the Insider Program for Windows Server, you will continue to get the latest builds as usual.
And finally, if you wish to download it now, you can find it here.
You can read more about this announcement here.
