Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials: A Better Solution than you Thought (Part 3)

If you would like to read the other parts in this article series please go to:

• Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials: A Better Solution than you Thought (Part 1)
• Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials: A Better Solution than you Thought (Part 2)

Introduction

In this multi-part article, we’re delving into the benefits and limitations of Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials and how it can be used to best advantage in some common small business scenarios. In Part 1, we laid the groundwork with a brief history of Small Business Server (SBS) and its evolution into WS Essentials, then we introduced some of the features of the R2 version. In Part 2, we took a more detailed look at some of the enhanced and new features in Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials that can give small business admins more flexibility and control over their networks.

Storage Spaces

One of the coolest new features in Windows Server 2012 R2 is Storage Spaces, which is a feature in Windows Server 2012 R2 that enables you to group drives together to create a storage pool that you can use to create the virtual drives called storage spaces. Internal and/or external drives of any type (SSD or platter, USB, SATA, SAS) can be used in creating the storage pools. This feature is also a part of Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials.

The great thing about storage spaces is that unlike a conventional drive, they can be quickly and easily expanded when you need more capacity. All you have to do is plug in additional physical drives. This greatly enhances storage scalability for your WS Essentials server.

Storage Spaces supports thin provisioning. This means that you can create virtual drives that are actually bigger than the capacity of all of the physical disks in the storage pool. Then you can dynamically add physical disks when you get close to using the physical capacity without having any effect on the virtual disk.

You can also utilize Storage Spaces to provide resiliency (fault tolerance and reliability) for the data you store, with the choice of two optional modes: parity or mirroring. Most Windows admins will be familiar with both from your experience with RAID arrays. With Storage Spaces, you can create three different types of spaces: simple spaces, mirror spaces and parity spaces.

As you might guess, simple spaces act like simple volumes: they simply store one copy of your files and can be created from just one drive, then expanded by adding more drives. Simple spaces are optimized for high performance but they don’t provide any redundancy so if the drive fails, the data may be lost.

Mirror spaces are also good for high performance but also provide you with redundancy in case of a disk failure. You can create a two-way mirror or a three-way mirror. Mirror spaces create an exact copy of your data on one or two other disks. With a two-way mirror, if one drive fails you still have everything on the other drive. With a three-way mirror, even a failure of two disks won’t put you out of business.

Parity spaces use a minimum of three drives and write data across the drives. If a drive fails, the data can be reconstructed from the parity information. Parity spaces aren’t as high performant as simple and mirror spaces, but do provide fault tolerance and are more efficient in the use of disk space.

Obviously, these different types of spaces are appropriate for different use cases. Simple spaces should be used to store information that’s not mission critical or that is backed up in some other way (such as to the cloud) or that is only temporary such as video rendering files.

Mirror and parity spaces both can be used for critical data and operating system and/or application files but mirroring gives you higher performance so is generally better unless you’re concerned about the amount of disk space used, in which case parity will allow you to store the same amount of data on less total disk space. However, parity requires a larger number of drives to provide the same fault tolerance.

With large hard drives as inexpensive as they are, I would tend to prefer mirror spaces for most use cases because it’s easier to restore the data in the event of drive failure. In addition, if you format the mirror space with ReFS (Resilient File System), your data integrity is automatically maintained.

Windows Server Essentials Small Business Scenarios

Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials can be deployed in a few different ways in the small business environment.

Deploy in a new Active Directory environment

You can set up an Active Directory environment quickly and relatively easily using Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials. The Windows Server Essentials Experience will be enabled by default. You can deploy WS Essentials on a physical machine or in a virtualized environment.

The licensing for Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials allows you to set up the Hyper-V role, to set up another guest operating system that is running WS 2012 R2 Essentials. The Before You Begin page in the setup gives you the option to set up WS 2012 R2 Essentials either as a virtual instance or on physical hardware (depending on system provider). The wizard provisions a VM and then you configure WS 2012 R2 Essentials in the same way as deploying a physical machine.

This involves using the Configure Windows Server Essentials Wizard. You’ll need to enter a few items of information such as time settings, company info, and create a new administrative account, then the server will take about 20 minutes to configure the OS, restarting several times in the process.

Deploy in an existing Active Directory environment

You can deploy WS Essentials in an existing Active Directory environment during the 21 day migration grace period. In this case, the WS Essentials computer must be the DC at the root of the forest and domain. It will hold all of the FSMO roles, and there cannot be a read-only DC in the domain. This scenario requires you to plan the migration of your line of business applications, set up WS 2012 R2 Essentials, rename the computer and make it a replica DC, and transfer all the FSMO roles to it. Then you configure the Windows Server Essentials Experience role, make any needed changes to the DHCP scope, demote and remove Active Directory from the previous DC and finally, set up the WS Essentials features on the new DC.

You can find more guidance for this type of deployment in the Windows Server Essentials and Small Business Server Blog on the Microsoft TechNet website.

Deploy as part of a hybrid IT environment

Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials can be used by small businesses to follow the hybrid IT approach that combines on-premises and cloud-based IT services for the most cost effective, convenient and easy (for both administrators and users) way to go.

The WS Server Essentials server can be used as a small company’s on-site secure server to create a high security environment for sensitive mission-critical data such as confidential client data and transactions, using add-ons such as Windows Rights Management Services (RMS) for further protection and control of sensitive documents. This is especially appropriate in those security-focused businesses such as law firms, doctors’ offices, small police departments and others where IT is not a core competency and easy management of IT assets is a big plus.

Other, less sensitive applications and data can be provided through a cloud service. Non-sensitive data can be stored and/or backed up in a cloud storage provider’s data center. Public web sites can be hosted. The combination of on-premises and cloud resources provides flexibility and ease of administration. This is especially true if your organization has very large amounts of non-sensitive data, in which case you can take advantage of the economies of the cloud for that big (or semi-big) data.

As another example, a small medical offices might want to maintain an on-premises server for specialized applications and patient personal information that falls under HIPAA regulations, while using a hosted service such as Office 365 or hosted Exchange for email and other communications services.

In fact, the combination of Office 365 and on-premises Windows Server Essentials is becoming a more and more standard solution for small businesses because it can give you the best of both the cloud and on-site worlds. Microsoft has made it very easy to integrate the two technologies. Small business IT admins are relieved of the burden of running an Exchange server, SharePoint server, communications server, and web server, but still maintain control over their on-site domains.

For those who do want to keep those services on-premises, Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials can also be deployed in combination with Windows Server 2012 R2 machines running Exchange, SharePoint, etc. In those cases, a single physical server can be deployed to run Exchange and other business applications on virtual machines, to simplify, reduce cost and lower the physical footprint of the hardware resources.

Summary

Thanks to Microsoft’s licensing pricing structure for Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials, small businesses can reap most of the benefits of Windows Server at a lower up front cost and with reduced ongoing administrative overhead. It provides a lot of flexibility, since it can be deployed either as a complete on-premises solution, in combination with Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard or Datacenter edition, or as part of a hybrid cloud environment.

In this three-part series, we’ve provided a high level overview of what WS Server 2012 R2 Essentials is, its benefits and limitations, and how it can be incorporated into various small business use case scenarios. For more information, a good place to get started is Microsoft’s web site.

If you would like to read the other parts in this article series please go to:

• Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials: A Better Solution than you Thought (Part 1)
• Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials: A Better Solution than you Thought (Part 2)