Windows Server 2008 & Windows Server 2012: Feature comparison
First we’ll discuss about the Hardware requirements and then we go through the Features
Hardware Specifications between these two
Processor/Memory Feature | Windows Server 2012 | Windows Server 2008 R2 |
RAM per VM | 1TB | 64GB |
Virtual processors/VM | 64 | 4 |
# of Active VMs | 1,024 | 384 |
Virtual processors/VMs | 64 | 4 |
Virtual processors/hosts | 2,048 | 512 |
Maximum cluster nodes | 64 | 16 |
Maximum cluster VMs | 8,000 | 1,000 |
Physical Memory | 4TB | 1TB |
Features which are supported in Windows Server 2012 and that are Not supported by windows server 2008 as shown below:
New Features | ||
Private VLAN | Supported | Not Supported |
DHCP Guard | Supported | Not Supported |
Router Guard | Supported | Not Supported |
Hyper-V Extensible Switch | Supported | Not Supported |
Extension Monitoring | Supported | Not Supported |
IP Address rewrite | Supported | Not Supported |
Generic Routing Encapsulation | Supported | Not Supported |
Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) support inside VMs | Supported | Not Supported |
Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) | Supported | Not Supported |
Hyper-V Smart Paging | Supported | Not Supported |
Resource Metering | Supported | Not Supported |
Runtime Memory Configuration | Supported | Not Supported |
Virtual Hard Disk format | Supported | Not Supported |
Offload Data Transfer | Supported | Not Supported |
Data Center Bridging | Supported | Not Supported |
Virtual Fibre Channel in Hyper-V | Supported | Not Supported |
QoS Minimum Bandwidth | Supported | Not Supported |
Encrypted cluster volumes | Supported | Not Supported |
Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) 2.0 | Supported | Not Supported |
Application Monitoring | Supported | Not Supported |
Storage Spaces | Supported | Not Supported |
Data Deduplication | Supported | Not Supported |
SMB Direct | Supported | Not Supported |
Multi-terabyte volumes | Supported | Not Supported |
SMB Transparent failover | Supported | Not Supported |
Datacenter Diskless boot | Supported | Not Supported |
SMB 3.0 | Supported | Not Supported |
IPAM | Supported | Not Supported |
Cross-premise connectivity | Supported | Not Supported |
DHCP Failover | Supported | Not Supported |
CPU Throttling | Supported | Not Supported |
Active Directory based Authentication | Supported | Not Supported |
Cloning virtual domain controllers | Supported | Not Supported |
DirectAccess | Supported | Not Supported |
Hyper-V Replica | Supported | Not Supported |
Live Storage migration | Supported | Not Supported |