Windows NANO Server - The future of the Windows Server

Microsoft has announced that the next generation Windows Server to optimize the born-in-the-cloud applications and containers which we call it as “NANO Server”. Nowadays everybody is talking about the Cloud environment and most of the companies and customers are trying to migrate their services in to the Cloud.

The question is … What you expect from a Cloud Service. You need less down time and high availability to your applications, less hardware maintenance, speed, low cost, lower resource consumption, low security vulnerability, etc. Microsoft has designed a new cloud optimized platform to achieve these milestones in their server technology.

Nano server which goes the windows code name “TUVA” , is a 20 times smaller than the windows core server. There is no local logon and Remote desktop manageability. All the role and features are managing by WMI and Windows Powershell Microsoft is currently working to get some webbased management components for this nano server. You can install only the required roles and featured on the server including DNS,DHCP, Hyper-V within the limited deployment scenarios, Hyper-V fail-over clusters. You can deploy this Nano server with Microsoft Server 2016 TP2 (now TP 3 is available) which can be downloaded from Microsoft TechNet Evaluation Center.

Nano Server is focusing on two main scenarios:

Born-in-the-cloud applications – support for multiple programming languages and runtimes. (e.g. C#, Java, Node.js, Python, Ruby, etc.) running in containers, virtual machines, or on physical servers
Microsoft Cloud Platform infrastructure – support for compute clusters running Hyper-V and storage clusters running Scale-out File Server.

According to the current deployment and the test results of the Nano server compared to the Server, Nano server has :

93 percent lower VHD size
92 percent fewer critical bulletins
80 percent fewer reboots

Security Improvements comparing to the Server Core

Deployment Improvements comparing to the Server Core

Here I would like to share the presentation done by “Jeffery Snover – Distinguished Engineer” and “Andrew Mason – Principal PM Manager” at Microsoft regarding the next generation Cloud server Platform.