 Welcome everyone to the Introduction to Windows Server for Nonprofits and Public Libraries. Thanks so much for joining us for today's TechSoup webinar. Before we get started to make sure everyone is comfortable using ReadyTalk, the webinar platform we are on, I just want to point out where you can chat in to ask us any questions on the lower left side of your screen. You will be able to watch the presentation and hear the audio play through your computer speakers. If at any time you hear an echo, you may be logged in more than once, and will need to close additional instances of ReadyTalk. If the slides and the audio or the live screen sharing fall out of sync, we recommend dialing into the toll-free number that Susan has chatted out into the chat window. We will keep all lines muted, so chat into us to let us know if you have questions or need help at any time. If you lose your Internet connection, go ahead and connect again by clicking that green Join Meeting button in the reminder confirmation email. And if you do join us by phone and get cut off for any reason, feel free to dial back at any time. We are recording today's webinar, and you will be able to find it on our website at techsoup.org slash community slash event dash webinars. This is also where you will be able to find the archive of the webinar and any upcoming webinars that we are promoting. You will also be able to watch the video of this on our TechSoup video channel on YouTube. Within a few days you will get this full recording along with any slides and resources we discuss within the next few days. And if you would like to tweet today, you can do so at TechSoup or using the hashtag TSWebinars to share anything that you find particularly insightful with our Twitter community. My name is Becky Wiegand and I am the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup. I'm happy to be your host for today's webinar. We are joined by Jeff Wolfie who is the Principal Program Manager at Microsoft for Windows Server, sorry for Windows Server, and a leading expert on virtualization and private cloud. He's worked on virtualization technology for more than 16 years and he's played a leading role in Windows Server's engineering team, helping to shape the design requirements for Windows Server 2016, 2012, and 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2, and Hyper-V. He is an authority on all of the different ways you can benefit from virtualization, management, and cloud computing across public, private, and hybrid environments which we will talk about some today. You will also see on the back end assisting with chat Susan Hope Bard, TechSoup's Training and Education Manager. She will be on hand to help flag your questions and help you with any technical issues. Today's webinar is 90 minutes and we are looking at this as an introduction to Windows Server. So we hope that this will help you understand what Windows Server is, what it does, what it can do for your organization, and what the newest version of Windows Server, Windows Server 2016 adds as benefits to new features. So we will be talking about that over the course of the 90 minutes. We hope to start out simply and maybe grow to some more advanced topics as we go along. If you are not using Windows Server, if you are not an IT person, there are probably some terms that may be somewhat advanced. We will talk about things like different cloud computing and virtualization and virtual machines and things like that. So if that is over your head, that is okay. We want you to come away from this having an understanding of whether Windows Server is something that would be useful for you to continue to pursue if it is new to you. And if it is not something you want to pursue, we want you to understand that too. So we find that to be a useful way of you evaluating whether it is a good fit for your organization's needs. So before we begin with that topic, a little bit about TechSoup. We are a nonprofit that is everywhere on the map that is blue in this picture. So feel free to chat in to let us know from where you are joining us today. I'm located, and Susan is located in TechSoup's headquarters in San Francisco. And Jeff is joining us from Redmond, Washington where Microsoft is. So we have folks joining in saying they are from Brooklyn, New York, Pocotelo, Idaho. It's a fun city name. We've got 170 people on right now. We've got others from New York, Grand Rapids, Michigan, all over the place. So thank you all for joining us today. Oh, Marquette, Michigan. I went to Northern there. Love that town. Anyway, so if you are joining us from outside the United States, we recommend going to TechSoup.global and choosing your country from the dropdown so that you can learn about the donations available in your country. I will talk later about where to get Windows Server donations through the TechSoup.org program that is primarily geared toward organizations based in the United States. So again, if you are joining from outside the US, definitely check out TechSoup.global to access it in your region or part of the world. So I'd like to get us started with understanding a little bit more about you, our audience so that Jeff can speak a little bit more clearly to your needs and the way that you will be using Windows Server, or if you already are. So go ahead and let us know in the live poll on screen. Feel free to click on the option that most applies to you. We know that they are not all reflected, but feel free to click on the one that most applies to your role in your organization. And I have some abbreviations like MarkHom is Marketing or Communications. But feel free to let us know. We have lots of people clicking on IT Pro or Admin which is great, and lots of people clicking on many hats which I know is always my role when I work in smaller nonprofits for many years before coming to TechSoup. I'll give just a couple more seconds for people to click on this one and then we'll move on to a couple of other questions that again will help us speak a little bit more directly to your role, your needs, and understand your use currently. So showing the results, 61% are IT Pro or Admin roles which is great. You've come to the right place. And 34, many hats. So we know that that's frequently the case in nonprofits and libraries and faith-based organizations. Are you using any cloud services currently? So are you already using something like Office 365 or Microsoft Azure, Dynamics 365? Maybe you're using Google Apps or Dropbox or Box for file storage and sharing. Replacing on-site servers with cloud services. So again just a few seconds more and then I'll close this poll and open up to two other quick ones and then we will dive into Jeff's presentation. Again for those of you who've just joined us, this is a 90-minute webinar today. So we want to make sure that you're aware that we'll be here for 90 minutes and we hope you'll be able to stay with us for the whole event and that you'll give us your feedback in the post-event survey after the event to help us to continue improving our programs. So looking at this, oops, sorry I skipped without showing the results. Here we go. So it looks like about half of you are already using either Office 365, Dropbox, or Google Apps, or maybe a combination of all of those. This is really helpful to know who's already kind of moving toward the cloud. And then this last question, sorry, it's not the last question, we actually have two. Are you using virtualization or virtual machines? And yes, maybe you're using it using VMware or Hyper-V or maybe you do use virtualization but you're not sure what you're using or maybe your answer is just no and that's okay too. But feel free to chat in to let us know if there's something not included on this. So let me just let folks weigh in here and then I'm going to show the results. It looks like 55% are not using virtualization or virtual machines and 20% are using Hyper-V so already in the Microsoft Universe. Marilyn comments that she doesn't know what virtual machines are so that's helpful to know because I know we will have different levels of people on this event as an introduction course or not course but an introductory event so we want to make sure that we are defining things. And Kent commented on the back, they're using VM Red Hat and Steve comments Oracle Virtual Lock. So there are certainly other tools that we didn't include a full comprehensive list. And then the last question before we move into Jeff's presentation is what version of Windows Server are you currently using if you're using one? And so the option is there to say you're not using Windows Server if you're not. But let us know if you're on one of the older versions or if you've already moved into using Windows Server 2016. I didn't include all of the R's in between year versions like 2012 R is not on here. I just kind of left it at the basic years. So let us know here and then we will get into Jeff's presentation in just a moment. Give just a couple more seconds. Right now we've got about 185 people joining us in the room so thank you all for coming. And I'm going to show the results. It looks like we have a lot of people still on Windows Server 2012. And Lauren comments that they're using a combination of 2008 and 2012. So that's also an option. So I'm going to go ahead and move us forward to having Jeff take it over with his presentation. Tell us a bit about Windows Server and how it can really help nonprofits and libraries. What is it? What does it do? How can we use this to launch our organizations into better efficiency and greater abilities? Thanks for joining us, Jeff. Hey, thank you very much. It's really a privilege to be here and I appreciate everyone's time. I was just taking furious notes on the responses to everyone. And it was very interesting because I was looking at under the who section, I was good to see. I wasn't sure how many folks I was actually going to be on the call that identify themselves as IT professionals versus folks that wear many hats. And there were a lot of people that wore many hats, 76 IT pros and like 40-something that wore many hats. So I know that in a lot of nonprofits and public libraries a lot of people do have to wear many hats and ease of use. And a lot of times you don't have big IT staffs. And so yeah, there is one person who wears many, many hats. And it's great to see that. The other thing I was kind of particularly interested in was a little surprise that the number of people not using virtualization at this time. And I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people that are already on 2012. That's fantastic. 2016 obviously is brand new. So I expect a lot of people 2012, 2012 R2. It's good to see that you're on one of our latest releases out there because there's lots of goodness in there. 2012 and 2012 R2 was really a whole bunch of work that we started to do in enabling really cloud capabilities and software-defined data center capabilities from our Azure things on-premises. And we're doing even more of that in 2016. So my name is Jeff Wolsey. I'm a Principal Program Manager here at Microsoft. I have been working on virtualization and hypervisors for some time, but I also look very much across all of Windows Server now. So I look at storage, compute, networking, technology like containers, all sorts of new things. And one of the challenges I had honestly when I was working on the content for this was I knew that there were going to be a lot of people within a lot of different varying levels of technical expertise. So it's great to see we've got 76 IT pros. I also see there are plenty of folks with many hats and there are plenty of people, decision makers, and folks that may not even know what a server is. So I'm going to do my best to try and bridge all of these different levels of knowledge, but I am going to be keeping a close eye on the questions and do hope that we can get a chance to take those as well. So I tried to bring in to cover that as well. So I titled this one, Six Reasons You Love Windows Server 2016. And honestly I could have come up with dozens more, but we only had 90 minutes. So for those people who don't know what a server is very, very quickly and very, very briefly, what is Windows Server? Well it's really a platform for building infrastructure of connected applications, networks, and web services from a work group to the data center. You can think of it as it is a fundamental building block whether you're a small branch office, whether you're a massive cloud data center, you'll find Windows Server in all of these places. And for a lot of folks in nonprofits and public libraries, you may be used to it for some of the popular technologies and capabilities built into it. For example Hyper-V, which is our virtualization technology. Or if you need it for identification and security and authentication such as Active Directory. Of course File Server is one of the most popular uses for Windows Server to make it easy to share files with folks. Of course Print Server and so many, many more things. That's a very, very basic level of understanding about what Windows Server is, but just kind of give you an idea, it is truly a foundational building block. So in terms of Windows Server, just to give you a little bit of a background, we're celebrating 20 years of innovation this year with Windows Server. I know for some of the IT pros you may be going, well Windows Server NT4 isn't really the first version of NT. We go back to NT3 and you're right, but NT4 is really when Windows Server hit critical mass. And this is really where we started to change the game when it came to running servers. A lot of us think about pre-Windows NT4, running a server was something that you did on big, big, really expensive iron. You did it on Unix. You did it on custom hardware. And with NT4 we said, no, you can do this on x86. And we want to make server technology capabilities available to everyone. We want to make it available for the masses. Shortly thereafter we really started to add more and more capabilities and we embrace what we call the enterprise era and Y2K. This is where we added a whole bunch of capabilities that are extremely popular in Windows Servers, for example Active Directory, Group Policy, Centralizing Groups and Permissions, and so much more here in Server 2000. Then we get really to 2003 where we really introduced the .NET era of applications. .NET really introduced an easy way for people to write applications on top of a very popular framework in .NET. In fact, .NET is living and breathing and doing a fantastic job. It's really growing strong. In fact, we've actually open sourced .NET. .NET Core is publicly available and we've actually made it available so people can run it on Windows and on Linux now. So we've got it as part of the foundation and .NET I expect it to be around long after I retire. Then of course we get to Data Center in Server 2008. This is where we started to get to a larger class of servers. Instead of thinking about an individual server or even a collection of servers, we started really thinking about racks and racks of servers. We started introducing capabilities like virtualization and Hyper-V in 2008 and 2008 R2, which allowed us for the first time to run multiple operating systems on top of a single server. What virtualization is, for those of you because there were quite a number of people that don't know what virtualization is, let's just spend a moment on this. Essentially, up until the mid-auts, yes you can go back to 2003 there was virtualization there, but it was kind of the prehistoric age. I know I was back there doing it. But really virtualization got pretty popular starting in around 2007, 2008. Really what virtualization allows you to do is take a server which is just a standard x86 system, and instead of running one operating system, it allows you to run multiple operating systems. Now I can take a server. I can create a virtual machine and I can run Windows Server 2008. I can run Server 2012. I can run a client operating system. I can run Windows 10. I can even run Red Hat Linux or SUSE Linux or different types of Linux all on a single server. The reason why this was important is because, number one, it allows us to use server hardware much more efficiently. Instead of having, for example, 100 servers, I could actually easily do that with 10 servers or even less now considering how powerful modern-day servers are. I can easily run dozens of servers on a single physical piece of physical hardware. In fact, on my laptop, I ordinarily am running anywhere between 5 and 10 virtual machines and operating systems on my laptop very comfortably. So virtualization really began. Yes. Becky I'm sorry to interrupt. This is Becky. I just wanted to point out that we aren't seeing your shared desktop, so I have slides in the background, but I'm not quite sure which one you're on. So that's okay. I'm sorry I didn't realize for a moment. I thought you were giving some background without talking through the slides. So I apologize. I think I was on the slide that you were on, but I'm not sure of that, but I apologize if folks were behind on anything. Are you there now? Can you see that? Yep. I'm seeing your 20 years of innovation slide, which is what I had it on. So I'm glad that we were able to fight that. I'm glad we were. Well, thanks for following along. So that was 2008 in the data center area. And then Server 2012 was really when we began our move to the cloud. And here we're taking advantage of capabilities that we've been doing in our public cloud which is Azure. And what we're doing is we're actually bringing technology that we've been using Azure on-premises so that you can use in your organization if that's something that's appropriate to you. And Server 2012 really began that push with things like software-defined compute, software-defined storage, software-defined networking, and so much more. And then of course now it really culminates with what we're doing in Server 2016. And you're going to hear me talk about the cloud, you're going to hear me talk about servers. Trust me, I know again we have folks of varying technical levels, so I'm going to try and take this relatively slowly, and I'm going to explain all of these things. But really Server 2016, which we're going to talk about today, is really about the focus on hybrid cloud. And of course the best way to management, our first choice for management is System Center 2016. So as I talk about Server and I talk about cloud, you may be thinking, okay, are these interchangeable? No, let me explain how we think about cloud at Microsoft, and really what cloud means to us. So let's start very basically with how people have been running their organizations, whether they're small organizations or large organizations. And they tend to have something on-premises. And what people have been doing is they've been buying hardware and buying storage and buying networking and building their own on-premises data centers. Well, Windows Server is the foundation for what we've been doing on-premises. If you want to build virtualization, storage, networking, compute, all of these things, you can absolutely do that with Windows Server. And what people tend to ask me is, well, why should I be doing this on-premises? Well, generally people tend to consider doing things on-premises for a couple of reasons. The biggest one, quite honestly, is the word control. Every so often I talk with companies, I talk with companies and organizations around the world, and I'll talk with a company that will say, Jeff, I have a workload that has to run and can only run in a German data center on German soil by German citizens. Are you going to try and push me up to your public cloud? And my answer is absolutely not. This has nothing to do with technology. It has everything to do with data sovereignty, and compliance, and regulatory. And at the end of the day, the thing I want to be very clear about is I'm not going to tell you how to run your business. I'm not going to tell you where you should be running. If you want to run everything on-premises because you think you need that level of control, then you should do that. If you have a compliance or regulatory reason, you should do that. At the same time, we've been making huge investments in our public cloud, in Microsoft Azure. Azure is really about changing this paradigm completely. And I have to be honest with you, when I talk with a lot of organizations, especially nonprofits and smaller organizations, a lot of them are looking at public cloud as going, you know what, I don't want to have to deal with managing servers. You know what, if instead of managing a file server, I can just put this on a file server, or I can put this on resources running on Azure, and you're going to manage that for me, great, I'll do that. In fact, judging by the number of people that said you're already using Google Apps or Office 365 or Dropbox, you're probably seeing it firsthand. I mean, we've moved to Office 365. I use OneDrive for business. I use OneDrive personal, and I cannot imagine life anymore without OneDrive because it makes my life so much easier, whether it's sharing my personal photos with my family and friends, or whether it's sharing important documents with folks here at Microsoft, and I need to make sure they're secure, but I still need to be able to share them and collaborate. And Azure just makes this very, very easy. Instead of me having to manage a SharePoint site or do any of those things, guess what, Office 365 does that for me. I'll give you another perfect example, Mail Exchange. I remember a world 5, 8 years ago, everybody ran an exchange server. Everybody. It was like we all run our exchange, so we have to manage our Mail. And now you look at Mail and you kind of go, okay, is there a reason really why I have to run this on-premises? Why can't I just use Office 365? Why can't I let Microsoft manage all of that complexity for me? It manages upgrades and backups and all of those things for me. Guess what? I don't need to have a 3 to 5 to 10 person team managing my backups, my replication, all of those things. And every so often I will run into a company who really does still think they need to manage their own mail server. The one case recently about 8 months ago I ran into a legal firm. And the law firm said we think that for legal and compliance reasons we still need to run a mail server. We actually would love to move to Office 365, but we're still a little old school about this, and so we're going to continue to run it on-premises. And I said, that's fine. That's great. Here's the important thing. At the end of the day, whether you want to run this on-premises, if you want to run this in your own organization, managed by your folks, where you buy your hardware, you buy your storage, you buy your networking, you configure this, you set this all up, you back it up, you manage all of that stuff. If you want to do that, go right ahead. If you want to use Azure, and you want to use Office 365, and you want to take advantage of those, great. Or if you're like 95% of the people I talk to, what you really want is you want to blend this. You really want a hybrid solution. And hybrid is about basically saying, look, there are things that I feel I still need to run on-premises. Maybe you have something that is very sensitive data and for whatever reason, you want to make sure you continue to be able to physically touch a server. I have people that are like that. I've also had people say, you know what, I have some older applications, some custom written applications that are really important for my nonprofit. And these were written by someone many, many years ago. And we're just not sure we can take this to the cloud. We're not sure it'll actually run and will be successful, or if it's really ready for that. So we're going to keep running on-premises. That's great. Keep doing that. But if you also then want to take advantage of capabilities in the cloud, like for example, Azure Storage is ridiculously inexpensive. We can give you gigabytes and gigabytes and terabytes of storage for fractions of a penny. It's crazy inexpensive. And then we can also do things like your backup and your replication and so much more. Great. Then you should be taking advantage, looking at how we can do hybrid together. And a good example of that is doing backup, doing actually backup from your on-premises up to Azure. If you're a small organization and you would like to be able to replicate because you're worried. For example, you're worried about things like being able to replicate your data because it is sensitive information. And you want to be able to have an off-site location but you don't want to purchase or rent a secondary location to do replication. Great. You can make Azure your backup target, your replication target, and do that as well. So there's a lot of different options and a lot of different ways you can think about using both your on-premises or capabilities as well as public together. And really that's where most people tell us they want to go. They really want to blend and really take advantage of the best of both. Finally, we are working on something called Azure Stack. Just to point this out, I'm not going to really spend too much time on that today, but Azure Stack is really about taking Azure capabilities and actually bringing those on-premises. And it's really so that when you start to write your next generation applications, you can do that using a consistent API set with Azure and actually do it on-premises. At the end of the day, the thing that's powering all three of these is Windows Server. So the reason why I want you to understand this is whatever investment you make, whether you decide you want to keep running on-premises with Windows Server or when you want to use Windows Server in the public cloud, no problem. Guess what? It's what powers our public cloud. Microsoft Azure actually runs off Windows Server, it actually runs off our hypervisor, our storage, our networking, all of those things. And what we are doing is bringing more and more of those capabilities from our public cloud on-premises so you can take advantage of those. So one of the things I get asked about all the time is, okay, so Jeff, what is public cloud? If I was to go to public cloud, what's the one reason why people are going to public cloud? And there is one major, major reason. And the reason is agility. So for example, if I need to write a new application today, guess what? Yeah, you could write it on-premises or you could take advantage of the capabilities up in Azure. And you may be thinking, what capabilities are you talking about? Well, here's just one example. Okay, by the way, this, pardon me if it's an eye-chart by the way, but the goal here is to show you, and by the way, this isn't even all of the things that are available. These are just a few of the things that are available in Azure today. So for example, if you want to run virtual machines, certainly you could do that. But if you want to write mobile apps, if you want to write web apps, if you want to make sure, for example, that you want to make a web app that's really easy so that you can communicate with your constituency. And a lot of people, guess what? Phones have gotten really expensive, whether it's an Android, whether it's an iPhone, whatever it is, don't want to write a web app, a mobile app, you can do it quickly and very easily right there all on Azure without buying a single server or anything. If you're worried about things like I mentioned before, backup and site recovery, you'll notice here under storage and backup in the third row. We've got backup, we've got site recovery, we've got something called Store Simple which basically gives you, think of it as having bottomless storage for your organization at really, really, really inexpensive prices because we're taking advantage of our crazy large capabilities and our massive investments around the world. And so what you see here is you see resources in terms of compute, storage, management, networking, databases, identity, and of course probably one of the most popular things is security. We've been doing a whole bunch of major investments in security so that you can better secure not only your applications that you've written but also things that you're doing on-premises. And I'll talk about how that's come on-premises in the Windows Server as well. So I mentioned agility. So number one is all of these services are readily available. If you wanted a database today on-premises in your organization, what would you do? Well, you'd set up a server, you install Windows Server, you install SQL, you'd set up your database and you'd go. Then of course you'd have to patch it and manage it and back it up and do all of that stuff. Well if you did this in Azure, all you do is you go up to Azure and you say create a database. That's it. We'll handle the patching, we'll handle the backup, we'll handle the lifecycle management. What you do is you tell your folks to focus on the most important thing which is your mission. Your mission should really be to do whatever the mission is of your nonprofit, not necessarily being an IT organization. And in fact I'll give you a perfect example from a company you probably already know, Boeing. Boeing is one of the largest, if not the largest airplane manufacturer in the world. And we were at a meeting some time ago with Boeing and we were chatting with them about their investments in Azure. And they are doing a crazy amount of investments in Azure. And I was really curious, I was listening to one of the persons who manages their IT. And he said, we had this realization at Boeing one day. He said, we realize we weren't an airplane company anymore. We all kind of stopped and listened to him. We said, what? He said, we weren't an airplane company anymore. We were a software company that happens to make airplanes. We were spending so much of our time figuring out how many servers to buy, how much storage to buy, how much software to write. And we weren't focusing on what we should be doing, which is building better airplanes. And by them moving to Azure, they're basically saying, look, you guys, Microsoft, you handle the backups, you handle the compute, you handle the storage, you handle the networking, you handle all that stuff for us. Let us focus on our mission. Our mission is to build better planes. I'll give you one more example. If you've watched the Olympics, the Sochi Olympics, or the Rio Olympics we just had last year, that was all delivered on Azure. And we delivered it to over 100 million customers around the world. And we partnered very closely with NBC and all of these media companies around the world. But the goal was really simple. We wanted to make the Olympics available to anyone and everyone around the world. And yeah, that's a big, massive company scaling up. But it doesn't matter what the size of your organization is. One of the areas where we're seeing some massive adoption honestly is very small organizations because they say, you know what, Jeff, I don't have an IT team. Or I have a very meager IT budget. And as much as I would love to be able to have a rack of servers here and a bunch of developers doing a bunch of things, I've got to figure out how to do a lot with very little resources. So again, this is part of what Azure has to provide. And one last thing I promised before, and I will switch into Windows Server, is also there's a part of the agility is the fact that we can deliver features so much faster. So in Azure, what you just saw there scrolling by was over 500 new features we delivered in the last 12 months. Those are all new features that just lit up in Azure. As opposed to you didn't have to buy any software. You didn't have to run a patch. You didn't have to update something. You didn't have to upgrade something. You didn't have to manage something. We didn't have to train you. You didn't have to migrate anything. Nope, if you just logged in, if you were working on Azure, in fact this has happened to me where I worked on Azure on a Friday, went home, hung out with the kids, hung out with the family, went and saw Rogue One again, came back in on Monday morning, logged back into Azure, and guess what? There were 10 new features there. I didn't do anything. We just upgraded it for you. And when you logged in, you had new features that allow you to do more and be more productive. So that's the last thing I'm going to say about Azure from a technology standpoint. The last thing I want to show you is when I talk about cloud, people ask me, what is cloud? What really is cloud? Well, to give you an idea, here is just one of our many data centers around the world. We actually have 38 regions around the world and each region consists of multiple data centers. This is just one of our data centers. This is actually, you can see that there's a car in the front to just give you an idea of scale. It's actually, the perspective actually is a little bit off because the car is closer to you. It actually looks bigger than it really is because the data center is massive. And in fact, that's the data center as it exists today. We're in the process. This is another view of that same data center. We're actually in the process of quadrupling the size of that data center. And again, we have 38 regions around the world and these are just filled with state-of-the-art compute and storage and networking capabilities that we provide. So why am I telling you about all this? Why am I giving you this Azure cloud thing? Because what I want to point out to you is IT is truly being pulled in two directions. On the one hand, you're being told, I need you to do more with less. I know you've got just a few resources. But at the same time, I need you to be fast because we need to do more. We need to do more for our constituents. We need to do more to meet our missions. We need to do more and help our customers. So we need you to be faster. At the same time, IT is also being told, by the way, this needs to be secure and this can't ever go down. We can't have any downtime and everybody is getting hacked right now. So you've got to make sure this is secure. So I need you to move faster with less. I need you to innovate more. I need you to be more secure. I can't have any downtime. But I'm going to give you less budget to do this with. So IT is being stretched all over the place. And in fact, we've seen this, that IT is starting to move, spending more in the hybrid space so that you can again leverage the best of both worlds, take advantage of what the cloud has to offer and take advantage of what you're doing on premises. At the same time, these demands have come from a variety of different places. The finance guy is telling you we need to run cheaper. The CEO is saying, hey, we need to do better. We need to make sure that again, security is the top priority. I don't want to be the next headline for a breach. And developers, guess what? They want to make sure that they're working faster because they want to be able to meet your mission. So understandably, we've been focused on these areas for this release of Server 2016. The first thing we did was we focused very much, very much on security. And I cannot stress this enough. Everybody has been telling us left and right, we are completely freaked out by what's going on here. It seems like every day we are seeing and reading about another major hack. We're seeing about another major issue going on there. And we want additional layers of protection. And we want to understand where these threats are coming from because it seems like they're coming from new attack vectors. At the same time, we love what you're doing with virtualization. We love the fact that servers now can do so much more. A server can be storage. It can be compute. It can be networking. It can do all sorts of different things. I want to make sure that you keep continuing to make investments in that area. And then finally, what can we do to accelerate apps on Windows application development on Windows Server? So with that, let's dig in to Windows Server 2016. And so I titled this, Top 6 Reasons You're Going to Really Enjoy Windows Server 2016. And again, there's plenty more, but I again, due to the limits of time, I've stuck to six. Let's start with the first one, Privileged Identity. Well, that's a fancy way of saying something. Well, let me explain what this is really all about. Privileged Identity is a way to identify the fact that the bad guys are looking at new ways to attack your business, your organization, your nonprofit, your library. How are they doing this? Well, here's what's happening. The bad guys are doing these things called phishing attacks. And you've probably seen one. You probably had one before. You get an email that says, hey, you just won $5,000. All you need to do is click right here. And that link looks kind of mysterious. And what they're trying to do is they're trying to get you to install something inadvertently on your system so that they can try and hack your system. And by hacking your system, they're going to try and get inside your organization. There's lots of different ways they can attack, but if they can attack just by sending you a simple email, and guess what, humans are an easy attack surface, then they can try and get to your device. They can try and get to your network. They can try and expand and actually get throughout your entire organization. And there's a lot of different reasons why they do it. Sometimes it's to disrupt business. Sometimes it's lost productivity. Sometimes it's data theft. Sometimes it's ransom. You never know. But there's a lot of different reasons why the bad guys are trying to get in. The important thing is we have seen this new type of attack. And this attack is actually going after the user itself. And this is different because historically, the network has been seen as the primary attack surface. If you look at a bunch of bad movies in the 80s and 90s, it was always about the bad guys are going to attack us through the firewall. In fact, I think Harrison Ford was in a movie called Firewall. And the whole point of this is well, if they can get through the firewall, they're going to breach the business and make trouble. You know, at the end of the day, the bad guys realize there's a much easier way than trying to attack your firewall. It's really identity. Identity is the new attack surface. Now, you may be thinking, really? Well, Jeff, this sounds kind of hard. Isn't this really difficult? Actually, no. Attackers have a few dangerous weapons. For example, a search engine, whether you're using Google, Bing, you name it. Here's an example of something I found. This is an organizational chart I found in less than 10 seconds. This is a healthcare provider. I found this. It has the names of the CEO, the CFO, and guess what? All of these folks including the CTO linking to the director of IT. All I need to do is rely on something called human nature. All I need to do is send an email, maybe on a late Friday afternoon, hey guys, meet you downstairs, or hey, here's a picture of some photos we took at the last company, whatever. All I need to do is get someone to click on something that allows me to install some malware. And that's my way to get inside an organization. And a lot of times people will tell me, you know what, Jeff, I hire really good people. I'm not really worried about that. You know what? I think the evidence is otherwise. The folks at Ars Technica actually looked at this and they actually did a study. And they found out that over 50% of people click anything sent to them. These phishing attacks are very, very common. So from a security perspective we looked at this and we said, look, we got to put a stop to this. We've got to really lay down some new security capabilities in the OS that just makes this a wall to help protect against these types of attacks where they're going after identity and going after credentials. And so these social engineering leads to credential theft. And they try to seek out credentials. They try to do this thing called elevation of privilege where they become an administrator. And if they can do that very quickly, guess what? They can do things to take advantage of their infrastructure. And there's a number of new capabilities we have introduced in Server 2016 that are all just built in. Credential Guard and Remote Credential Guard. We actually looked at this very, very carefully. We looked at exactly how these people were attacking servers, the types of methodology they were using. And we introduced brand new virtualization-based security that's built into the operating system that literally stops you from getting its tracks. It actually stops, you cannot, there was a couple of attack methods called pass-by-ash and pass-the-ticket. And these are simply dead-in-the-tracks by protecting these stored credentials through this new virtualization-based security. It allows us to really protect a server. And in fact, we actually introduced this in Windows 10 client as well. So if you're running Windows 10 with the latest updates and you're running Windows Server 2016, this capability is all baked in. We also did some work about protecting administrators. In your organization you probably have someone who, if you have a server today, who manages things like your file servers, your domain controllers, and things like that. And these domain administrators are extremely important individuals. And the important thing is you want to really protect those credentials. And you want to make sure that someone can't spoof those. And more importantly, we want to make sure that we're providing folks the best way to be actually administering their servers. And so what we want to do is we want to limit it in things like, in terms of their set of actions, or in just-in-time administration. So for example, if I'm an administrator, most of the time I'm actually doing my email. I'm doing my PowerPoint or my office work or whatever or my creative stuff. And I shouldn't actually be logged in as my full domain admin Jeff. I should be logged in as just standard user. The things like just-in-time administration that allows us to limit it. And so you know what? I'm only an administrator for a very short amount of time for the next 30 minutes while I do this action. And after 30 minutes I'll go back to being a standard user. And so these are just an example of a few of the capabilities that we built in to protect credentials, and things that are just baked into Windows Server 2016. I also want to point out that from a hybrid standpoint you may be thinking, well, how does this relate to Azure? Well, one of the things that we've done is we actually make sure that this works with Azure multi-factor authentication. Multi-factor authentication, big long buzzword here, here's the important thing to understand. This is an easy way to provide a second level of authentication for your infrastructure. I'll give you a perfect example. I'm sitting at home on my personal surface. It is not domain joined. It is not a Microsoft product. It's my personal surface. I actually need to log in to SharePoint. And that SharePoint could be running here at Microsoft. It could be running on Office 365. So I go to log in and I type in my name and my password. And it's the correct name and password. But when I log in it looks at my device and goes, you know what, Jeff, this device, I don't recognize this device. This isn't a Microsoft purchase device. This looks like some device that we don't know about. So as a second form of authentication, we're going to call your phone. And your phone is going to ask you double check. I can type in a PIN or if I'm using my iPhone, I actually just use my thumb print. And it just double checks. And it takes an additional five seconds. But what it helps protect against is sometimes the bad guys are literally an ocean away. They are literally on another continent. And they're trying to break into your organization. And you know what, just by adding the second form of authentication, it just makes it that much harder. This is something we've been using at Microsoft truly for years. And it's really seamless. It's really easy to use, but it's a great way to help protect your infrastructure. And again, just allows you to easily plug into Azure if you want to use this. Also, from a security perspective, I also want to make sure that we want to protect the OS itself. We know that the bad guys are always working on new ways to try and break into an operating system and get your data. And a lot of times it's things like ransomware. We've seen this in universities where people tend to be a little liberal on their who shares what on the sharing software and who knows where it came from. And guess what, if some bad software or some anti-malware or some ransomware gets in there, really bad things can happen. So we've done things to protect against new exploits that are trying to attack the OS very early on in the boot process. The other thing we want to do is we want to protect against known threats, but we also want to protect against, you know what, there are unknown threats that haven't been written yet. How do we protect against something that doesn't exist yet? We know the bad guys are out there working on some new way to try and break into your organization and break into our operating system. So we've done a number of things to help do that. And guess what, these are all just baked in. These are all just built-in device guard. Basically, this means that we only allow permitted binaries to be executed. So basically, when you turn on a machine, only these specific things can run. I can basically make a statement that says, hey, you know what, only the hypervisor can run or only this storage can run. And this provides another level of additional security. The next one, Windows Defender. This is something we just do automatically out of the box. You don't need to do a single thing. Windows Defender is our built-in anti-malware. We've been shipping a form of Defender in Windows client for some time. We haven't included it in server until now. We've talked to many organizations who say, Jeff, you know what, I have to put antivirus on my servers. I require it for compliance and regulatory. So it's an extra cost for us. And we said, you know what, if you want to use a third party, you can. But we're going to include one in the box. And we're going to make sure that ours just simply works. It's not going to slow down your system. It's not going to impact your workloads. And we're going to make sure that it's just an optimized defending solution that's built into the box. And then finally, there's something called Control Flow Guard. And I'm not going to go into all of the specifics around this. Here's the important thing you need to know about Control Flow Guard. This is a technology that's really designed to help protect against attacks that haven't been written yet. What we do is there are classes of bugs that are classes of corruption attacks that try to use parts of memory or try as ways to attack applications. We basically, nope, we actually shut those down completely. And what this does is it hardens the system further and it just helps protect even against those types of applications, those types of bad malware applications that haven't been written yet. Finally, we get to virtual machines. And I was actually struggling back and forth when I was working on this presentation with how much should I really talk about this? I wasn't sure how many of you were actually using virtual machines and it turns out the majority of you aren't using virtualization yet. I did see that a little over 30 and somewhere in the 20s were using VMware. But here's the important thing to note. Virtual machines, first of all, are fantastic. There's a reason I've been working on them for so long. Hypervisors and virtualizations are fantastic. They allow you to create a virtual machine in software and then allow you to run an operating system and run your workloads inside them. However, and this is a big however, virtual machines are easy to copy. I can simply right click and copy a virtual machine onto a USB stick and take it home. Guess what? You don't even know I took it. Virtual machines have tons and tons of benefits. Things like live migration allow you to migrate VMs from one server to another server without any downtime. It allows you to snapshot them. It allows you to easily back them up. But because a virtual machine is just a couple of files, it also makes it really easy to copy on a USB stick, copy it on a storage device, and take it home without anybody knowing you did it. So what we did was we worked really hard on this problem. This has actually been a problem that has existed since virtualization was ever created way back in the 60s if you can imagine that. Which is, hey look, I can copy a virtual machine and I can run it anywhere and you'll have no idea. Well, we actually introduced a brand new technology that actually helps guard against this. It's called shielded virtual machines. And shielded virtual machines essentially encrypt the virtual machine not only from somebody walking up and grabbing it and taking it home with them, but actually protects it against even from rogue admins. So we've actually gone far and beyond anything that exists in the industry. Shielded virtual machines, I've shown this to companies of all sizes. I've shown this to actually a company that had a bunch of insurance offices, some branch offices, as well as banks that have lots of branch offices and they're worried about, you know what, it's real easy for someone to, you know, what happens if a machine grows legs and it's running VMs on it. It's an insurance company that has lots of protected information. Well, if you put it in a shielded virtual machine, even if I, as an administrator, walk up, plug in a USB stick, copy a virtual machine, take it home, and try and run it on my machine at home, it won't work. With a shielded virtual machine, you can basically specify it can only run on your organization. So it's an extremely powerful technology and this I could spend an hour on just by itself. I urge you, if this is something that's interesting to you, we have a bunch of YouTube videos that talk about this that actually demonstrate this and actually demonstrate the whole and it will show you end-to-end how this works. But really, it's a cutting-edge capability especially for folks that are worried that, you know what, I do need to run servers. I do have some sensitive information. And by the way, my quote-unquote server room is actually a closet with a slightly bigger lock. Not everybody has a quote-unquote data center with tight physical access. So shielded virtual machines are another way to help protect precious workloads like that. And it protects against server administrators, storage administrators, network admins, backup operators, virtualization hosts. It essentially puts the administrator of the virtual machine in charge of their VM the way it should be. All right, I'm going to keep moving on here because I have to keep conscious of time. And I want to get to server management tools. So one thing that I'm really excited about is with the work that we've been doing in terms of integration, both with what we're doing in Windows Server and with Azure, some of the things we're doing in Azure that benefits server are really, really awesome. And one of these are the server management tools. So with these server management tools, we're introducing these tools that allow you, it's a free tool set by the way, that you log into Azure and imagine you could manage your Windows Server remotely. So for example, say you've got a few nonprofits in a couple of different locations. And in each one of those locations, guess what? You've got a server or two. And you haven't moved to the cloud yet and you will someday, but you're not there yet. But you've got some servers and you feel there's still someone who has to manage these. Wouldn't it be great if that person could actually be doing this from home? If they could just log into one portal and actually manage these servers remotely without having to go to any one of these branches. That's pretty cool. And so this is something that we've added in Server 2016. It's a part of a feature of the Azure portal. And again, it is free. These are free tools. And what's cool about this is because this work is happening in Azure, we've been adding a whole bunch of features on a pretty regular basis. Every few weeks, more features light up in Azure. And literally it's, I bring up my web browser, I go to azure.microsoft.com, I log in, and now I can manage my servers in different locations. Now I'm not telling you if you've got hundreds of servers or thousands of servers, this is the way to do this. This is really great if you've got a few servers here and there. If you needed really, if you had that level, that level of scale, then I would probably point you to a different set of tools. But if you've got servers here and there, it's hard to even give you a number. But I've talked to a number of folks where for branch office locations, for public libraries, schools, they look at this and they go, oh my gosh, instead of having my IT guy constantly on the road, guess what? I could have this person just literally logging in from home and managing and being able to do this without having to incur additional time of them going from place to place. These server management tools, they're web-based until they're cross-platform. And here's a good example of what it looks like. This could work on your Mac. This could work on a Linux box. This could work on your iPad. This could work on your Android. This could work on your Surface. And what it does is it includes replacements for a whole bunch of tools that if you're used to Windows Server and a bunch of you are, like things like Task Manager, the Registry Editor, Event Viewer, Device Manager, Control Panel, Disk Management, guess what? These are all available in a web UI. And this is all delivered in 9th HTML5, so it's easy. It's super touch-friendly, very lightweight because again, it's all web-based. And it manages also Server Core and Server with the graphical user interface. So this is actually down level, by the way. I should also point out this supports down to, I believe, Server 2012. So if you haven't had a chance to play with this, I urge you to take a peek at this. It's called the Remote Server Management Tools. Again, it's free. All you need to do is log into Azure. You don't need to pay for anything to log into Azure. This is all free. And like I mentioned, because this is all happening on top of the Azure portal, we're constantly adding new features. And guess what? You don't need to do anything to update your software. The portal is getting updated and you're just getting new features for free. So something I urge you to take a good look at. And we'd love to hear your feedback on that. Number of use cases. It's a single location for visibility on premises. By the way, if you have things in Azure, you can manage them through that tool. If you have them in a bunch of branch offices, you can manage them through that tool. If you're using our new Nano Server, which is a very teeny tiny deployment of Windows Server, you can use the Server Management Tools to manage those. Even though Nano Server actually doesn't have its own graphical user interface, this would provide it. So there's a whole bunch of really interesting things going on with the Server Management Tools. Next, let's get into Compute. This is a very, very popular session. I know a number of you mentioned Hyper-V. Well, there's a bunch of challenges that our customers face. One is when you're running a bunch of virtual machines on a single server, you have bottlenecks you have to deal with. What happens when a whole bunch of servers are trying to access IO at the same time for storage or networking? How do I optimize my resource utilization? I need to perform updates of the hardware without any business disruption. I need to integrate more operating systems, storage types, and hardware into my solution. So how do I manage it? A bunch of interesting challenges. And guess what? We've been after every single one of these. Just in terms of scalability, this is a massive, massive jump into Server 2016. The one on the left is Server 2012 and 2012 R2. These are quite simply the biggest servers that exist on Earth today. We support up to 24 terabytes of memory. That's a crazy, crazy increase. We support the largest servers in the world with the largest amounts of memory and virtual machines, up to 12 terabytes, and virtual machines with up to 240 virtual processors. I'm sure you're probably going, Jeff, I own nothing near that size, and that's fine. You don't have to. I just want to let you know, trust me, if you ever decide to go big, we got you covered there as well. When it comes to flexibility, probably one of the most important tools in our arsenal is live migration. With Hyper-V, I can move my virtual machine from one server to another without any downtime at all. And I could move the virtual machine, I could move just the storage, or I could move both of them simultaneously. So if you look at the top, you can see we've got live migration over TCPIP. We've got live migration with compression. We've got live migration over SMB. That first, that top row is just about moving the VM, where the storage actually sits still. You probably have it on the shared storage like maybe a scale-up file server, or maybe a SAN or something like that. But in that case, you just move the VM. And what it allows you to do is it allows you to do maintenance on the underlying server without any sort of downtime at all, but you move your virtual machine around and your folks that are attached to it don't even know what's happening. Then below that, we've got storage, which allows us to move storage from one location to another without any downtime as well. And then finally, my favorite is one called Shared Nothing Live Migration. With Shared Nothing Live Migration, I can have literally two servers with nothing but an Ethernet cable. That's right, two servers with nothing but an Ethernet cable, and I can live migrate that VM from one server to another. Now I do point out, this is not high availability. High availability, you still need some sort of shared storage. But if you just want to be able to move VMs around, you can absolutely do it without requiring shared storage, doing it all over Ethernet. The point here is we can do any type of live migration. We offer the fastest in the industry. And most importantly, it allows you to be flexible when you need to be probably with very limited resources. So we can run this on as minimal as two servers and give you flexible live migration. Another thing to point out is we understand that a bunch of you may have Linux in there as well. I heard a number of people mentioned some Red Hat and some Oracle in there. No problem. You want to run Red Hat, you want to run Suze, you want CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, Oracle, you name it, we run it all. And part of this I should point out is a reminder that this virtualization is the same virtualization we run up in Azure. And so this is one of these times where the work that we're doing up in Azure just trickles down to everybody running this stuff on premises. So we've been making Linux run better. We've been doing a whole bunch of work. We're actually one of the largest contributors now in terms of open source community and projects out there. And all of those investments are coming back to help us when we help work with you on premises. So if you're running Linux, don't worry about it. We can give you great networking, great storage, better protection, help you back it up, even give you automation capabilities through PowerShell, but just very flexible Linux support on Hyper-V. Moving to number two, storage. Probably one of, again, the most popular topics when I talk with customers. Again, customers of all sizes. It's really interesting to hear the challenges when it comes to storage because it really doesn't matter if you're a single branch office with two servers or a single server, or if you're the largest enterprise in the world. I can tell you right now that nobody has enough storage. You always need more storage, no matter how big an organization you are. I've never run into a customer who says, oh, I'm really happy with my storage. I always say, no, I need more and I need it faster. And by the way, I want it to be cheaper. So guess what we've been focused on? All of those things. We want to be able to move faster. It takes a lot of time right now if you set up storage and six months down the road, you need more. And six months down the road, you need more because how do you add to that? How do you migrate that? How do you deal with that? At the same time, how do you reduce costs? Over the last 15, 20 years, we've had these things called fans, storage area networks. And generally these were very, very expensive types of storage solutions. And a lot of people have realized, you know what? I can do all of this in software. And we can reduce this cost. In fact, it cost me more to train people to use these fans, these custom storage devices. And I really would like to be able to have someone that their entire skill set could go across my virtualization and my storage and my networking. And I also want to be very flexible with my storage. So one of the things we've been focused on is number one is if you want to use that existing fan because you happen to have one, great, it just works. We've been supporting fans for as long as I can remember. You can just plug a fan into Windows Server 2016 and it will simply work. And the goal here is really to give you choice. There's lots of different ways you can do storage. You can do it on-premises with file-based. You can do fans. You can do block storage. You can do file-based storage. You can do cloud fabric. And you may be looking at this going, oh my gosh, Jeff, what is all of this? Why are you telling me all this? Well, number one, I want to tell you we support them all. Number two, we want to let you choose what makes sense for you. And number three, most importantly, we want to help you reduce those storage costs. A lot of people are realizing this is a perfect example of where I can take advantage of the cloud to help me reduce my storage costs. What we find is in organizations of all sizes people will have a file server and they'll have a bunch of data that's resided on that file server. And guess what? A lot of that thing stuff sits around for a really, really long time. You know what? What if we could move some of that up to the cloud for you? What if you said, look, we're going to put that on really, really cheap storage where we charge you pennies. And the stuff that's running on your premises is the stuff that you're actively using. We're not saying we're deleting it. We're just saying let's move it up to low-cost storage and take advantage of this hybrid. Or if you want to continue to run it all on-premises you can do that. There's a couple of different ways you can think about some of the solutions that are coming out to market these days. The first is where you have virtualization and you have storage on two sets of servers. So on the top you can see we've got four servers. And on the bottom we actually have four servers as well. These servers have just plug-in disks. These are just standard servers with no special hardware. They're just using standard networking ethernet. And they have disks inside them. And basically this allows you to have your virtualization talk to your storage and we will replicate it all for you. And it allows you to scale both the compute and the storage separately. In some cases people are going, you know what? My organization is really small. You know what? I just need, give me four nodes. You know what? And in fact, I don't need separate servers for my virtual machines. I'd actually like to just have four machines total. So the one on the left uses eight servers. The one on the right just uses four. And in this case those servers are running both the virtual machines and the storage simultaneously. So this allows you to use your hardware very efficiently. And in those cases where, you know, budget is a premium but you want to be able to use something that will scale out over time then you can go with a hyperconvert solution. So this is something that's brand new to 2016. The goal here is to be able to make it easy that, you know what? If you set up four and you realize, you know what? Eight months down the road I need some more storage and I need some more virtual machines. Great. Guess what? Plug in another server. Now you can run more VMs and more storage. Six months down the road I need more storage. Guess what? Plug in another server. And you can run more virtual machines and you can run more storage. Now just to be completely transparent here I'm keeping this very, a very high level technical discussion here. We would actually go through a process called that scales it out. You could either do that through system center or PowerShell but it is a very relatively straightforward process. But the goal here is to allow you to scale out your infrastructure very quickly and very easily. Another area of storage investment has been around disaster recovery and about protecting your organization's data. Over the last many years we've noticed that people have said, you know what? I have a branch office or two branch offices or ten branch offices or a bunch of small locations. And I do have information that I would like to actually be replicated to another location because it actually is important to the mission of my organization and it is important that we somehow keep this. So there's a couple different ways you can solve this. The first thing you could do is you could have a site one say here in Redmond and site two could be Bellevue which is a sister city nearby and I could actually replicate my storage from one location to another. So as my web application or my database or whatever is being written on site one it's automatically being written over to site two at the same time. So if site one for example was to burn down, guess what? It's no longer there. There was a bad fire and site one is down, guess what? We just bring up site two and we keep running. This technology has been around for quite a while. Replication technology has been around for a long time. The problem is it's been extremely expensive and it always required specialized hardware. To do this means you had to buy a special storage thing for site one and then you had to buy a special storage solution for site two and they had to be exactly the same and they were really really expensive and then on top of that you had to buy that software in the middle that actually replicated from one location to the next. What we did was we said we want to make this really easy for everyone. So we built this all into Windows Server. We have the ability to do a scale-up file server in site one and site two and now for the first time in Windows Server 2016 we now include the software integration in the middle through Storage Replica. This allows you to replicate from site one to site two. And there's some really fantastic things about Storage Replica. Number one is it works with any storage. As I mentioned if you wanted to do this in the past you'd have to buy a solution from your storage vendor and you'd have to buy the same exact solution for site two. You couldn't mix and match vendors and very often you couldn't mix and match different storage solutions. Well in this case site one could be a single server replicating to site two which has a single server with just spinning disks inside it. So you can see wow all of a sudden we can scale down to very minimal hardware requirements. Or you can say you know what Jeff site one is actually got a file server and site two has a fan in it because it's actually my main data center. Okay guess what you can actually have file servers to sands. You could have a single server to a sands, a single server to a file server. You can mix and match. It simply just works. And the beauty of this is this is all built into Windows Server 2016 and again this could all be done using our scale out file servers. So really awesome things. We made huge investments in compute and storage. I didn't have any time to talk about networking and quite honestly that can get really technical really really quickly. So I'm passing on that today and I want to leave you with the last one which is remote desktop services or RDS. One thing I tend to see in a variety of organizations lots of libraries is they tend to have things like shared desktops and using remote desktop virtualization. And there are a number of challenges when you're trying to do desktop virtualization especially with modern applications and workloads are very graphics intensive. Graphic heavy apps can be slow to load, can offer poor user experience and limited connections can lock out users at peak times. A lot of applications really are trying to unlock the latest and greatest graphics capabilities out of hardware which very often can really tax remote desktop services. So in 2016 we really made some major investments here in remote desktop services to go after these challenges. A better graphics experience. So we've done a whole bunch of work now to leverage the hardware. I'll talk about that more in a second. We've also enhanced the connection broker so that we can scale to support more users easily with the built-in RDS solution. It's a more efficient cloud deployment reducing the number of VMs needed and we now support for cloud managed domain services. So there's a whole bunch of really great capabilities all around RDS itself but if we actually drive really into the graphical experience itself let's talk about what we've done with the virtual GPU. Back in Server 2008 R2 we introduced capabilities in what we call Remote FX that supported DX9, DirectX9, some of our graphical acceleration. In Server 2012 we did a major upgrade to support DX11. VM Connect supported the VGPU and we did some GPU management in there. In Server 2012 R2 we updated even further by supporting DirectX11.1 with even more video memory and really high resolutions up to 2560 by 1600 so that you could support larger displays which have really become the norm. But in Server 2016 we really did a crazy amount of work here to support OpenGL and OpenCL which are modern graphics standards for high-end graphics applications like Photoshop and engineering CAD-CAM applications will be used. You can now support it to a gigabyte of dedicated video memory. We support up to 4K resolutions now. Server VM support, of course we've done things to improve performance. And then if you take advantage of something we did in Hyper-V called discrete device assignment we can actually take the entire graphics card and map it in as well so that you can use GPU resources there to give you really maximum performance and you actually get the native GPU in RDS. So we're talking about really pulling out all the stops to make sure that for folks that really want a first-class remote desktop experience with the latest graphics capabilities you can do that. Now one of the things people ask me is so I see Jeff you guys have done a bunch of work in the graphics GPU but I also see that there are two ways to do it. There's this thing called RemoteFX and we have this thing that's new to 2016 called Discrete Device Assignments. Why would I use one versus the other? And what are the pros and cons to using this? So with RemoteFX and Discrete Device Assignment there's a really easy way to kind of explain the differences here. With RemoteFX we do accelerate the GPU but the important thing to understand is with RemoteFX you can still share the graphics card. So for example if I've got 10 people that want to use and share that graphics card they can all get a portion of that graphics card. So I could have 10 users logging in and using one GPU simultaneously because we actually partitioned it off. And so they get accelerated capabilities. It's not as much as Discrete Device Assignment but you're getting a major leap up. And for most people I would say start here. If you're doing just office applications, you're doing some light video and stuff like that, very good chance that that's all you need. And the nice thing about it is it allows you again to share a single GPU with a whole bunch of users simultaneously. Discrete Device Assignment is where you're literally saying this server has a GPU and I'm going to map the entire GPU into a VM. It's not going to share it with anybody. So if someone logs in and uses this GPU they get the full GPU. So what this means is, and by the way GPU, I'm sorry, Graphical Processing Unit. This is really for, I think of this especially for developers and folks that are doing CAD, CAM, engineering type work. So if you're a developer and you need to take advantage of GPU resources through things like called CUDA which is a raised actually program of the GPU itself and you need real access to it, this is how you do it. And the beauty of this is if you want to do this up in Azure, we have this in our end series of VMs. So if you want to try this out without buying any hardware, without doing anything and just see what it's like, you can actually log in to Azure, you can try it out and you can see what it's like to work with one of these VMs that has an end series VM that has this GPU. And then if you decide you want to use it, guess what? We built this capability into 2016 based on the work that we have done in Azure and we brought this into 2016 as well. So you can do this on-premises, you can do this in your organization, and you can have a discrete device assignment for virtual machines that you run for your RDS sessions. The difference again is the one on the left means you can share users to one GPU. The one on the right means no, there's no sharing, one person gets a GPU. One other thing to consider is the one on the right, you notice it's at low scale because you can only put so many GPUs in a server. Maybe two, maybe three, you're not going to get like 10 GPUs in a single server before you start to have to do some pretty crazy things with cables and chaffees and stuff like that. So think of it, you're only going to do two or three of those per server. Whereas on the left, if I had two GPUs and each one of those was supporting 10 users, I could easily support 20 users on one server. So again, there are pros and cons to both. You just have to figure out which one is right for you. But the good thing is we put them both in there and you can figure out which makes the most sense for you. And we've done a whole bunch of work around hardware decoders and the remote sessions and I'm not going to go into any detail on this other than to say, look, it just makes it easier on larger resolution monitors. You get better performance, you get higher resolution, and you just get a smoother experience when you're doing remote desktop. A high availability connection broker. Again, this is a perfect example of what do you want to do? Do you want to run on premises? Great. You can set up your own SQL Server and you can run all of this on premises if you want to do an art, you know, you're doing remote desktop. And you could use our connection broker and run this all in your organization. Or if you want to use Azure, you can do that as well. And we would manage, again, the patching, the lifecycle management up there, do what makes business sense for you. And I am not going to get into the architecture for the cloud other than to say, if you want to know more about RDS, we've got lots of documentation. It's publicly available. Lots of white papers and technical documentation you can see up on technet.microsoft.com. If you're interested in knowing more about RDS both 2012 R2 as well as 2016, the point I would make here to show just the one thing I would point out here is you notice on the left-hand side the RDS 2012 R2 infrastructure, you needed seven roles and eight virtual machines. With 2016, we actually greatly simplified it, eating only four roles and only two VMs. So we reduced the actual workload requirements and made it simpler for deployment and management. So that's what I want to point out there. So I know I've given you a lot to think about. I'll be honest with you, I know this probably went by in a blur. I know there was a lot of information there. And again, it's always a challenge to talk to folks in a variety of different technical levels. That's probably the biggest challenge because on the one hand, the IT pros want to go super deep, and they want to talk about the intricacies of virtualization and storage. And decision makers want to know, okay, but what's the right long-term strategy for me? What should I be doing for my organization? I'm a nonprofit today. And I'm trying to figure out where my organization should be in 5 years, 10 years, 15 years. And you know what? That's the question you should be asking yourself, quite honestly, which is, where do you want to be in 5 years? And here are a number of things to consider. Number one, look at the mission and the core competency of your organization. What is the mission that you're trying to get done? And how does IT fit into that? Is it something that you feel, you know what? You really need to maintain that level of control and you really do feel like you need to buy server, storage, compute, and run that in your organization under your control on your premises, then you should do that. And if you need to do that, Server 2016 is absolutely the way to get started. If you're looking at this going, you know what? There are some things that I really, really want to take more advantage of the public cloud. I'm using Office 365, and I would like to be able to spin up VMs and do more, and I could do that in Azure. Give it a try. I mean, it costs next to nothing to get started and to get your feet wet. And most importantly, if you're like most companies that I talk to, and you really want to take advantage of the best of both worlds where, you know, I am going to continue to use Office 365, I am going to continue to do things on premises, and I want to figure out what's the best way to deliver this hybrid solution, then Server 2016 is a great way to get started. Take a look at, you know, again, Hyper-V virtualization because it is the same hypervisor that we use on premises and in our public cloud. And this is an important point because quite honestly, we're the only public cloud that does this. If you use AWS, they don't provide software that you can write on premises. There's no AWS for on premises. If you're Google, they don't provide a hypervisor either. Their story is, you've got to run in Google, or that's it. And our strategy is real simple. We think you should be able to run your organization the best way that makes sense to you. If you want to run it on premises, you want to run it in Azure, or if you want to run a hybrid, then that's what you should be doing. So next steps, I would urge you to take a look at www.microsoft.com Windows Server 2016. I would watch the in-depth technical videos. If you really want to go deep, we can go in crazy deep in things like shielded VMs, where we explain exactly how it works, where we talk about the intricacies of the host guardian service, the TPM, how we actually configure this, how we set this up and walk you through and to end what that looks like. If you want a feed documentation for RDS, or Stored Spaces Direct, or our Scaleout File Server, check out the technical videos there. Our Windows Server blog is right with all sorts of information written by program managers like me across all of Windows Server, whether it's PowerShell, whether it's Automation, whether it's Storage, whether it's Networking, whether it's Compute, you name it. We have lots of PMs that are writing content, and of course technet.microsoft.com. And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't tell you to mention, of course, if you're not already using Office 365, please do take a good look at it. The best way to run mail these days really truly is Office 365. If you are still running Exchange On-Premises, the good news is we can make it super simple to take Exchange On-Premises and move it into Office 365, if that's what you prefer. And of course, checking out Azure, I showed you that one screen that had a variety of different icons and capabilities on it. The point I wanted to show you there was all of those services are available for you right now. You don't need to buy any hardware. You don't need to buy any storage. You don't need to buy any networking. If you have something, your nonprofit, your library, some service you want to do today, you can do it without buying any new hardware and be up and running literally in a couple of mouse clicks. It's incredibly valuable and allows you to do things very, very quickly. So with that, I am going to pass it back on over. Thank you, Jeff. Wow, a lot of information in 90 minutes. So thank you for those of you who have stuck with us. I'm going to go ahead really quickly. I've got a bunch of questions in the queue, and we've only got a couple of minutes left, but I'm going to scroll on back over here really quickly for those of you who want to know more about the options and Microsoft, how to get the donations. You get this through TechSoup if you are a nonprofit, public library, church, or foundation. You can browse by donor or partner. Click on Microsoft. That takes you to our Microsoft Software Donation page where you can see links to our top products including Windows Server over here on the right side. You can also browse all Microsoft products including license cows and stuff like that client access license and things like that that you would maybe need to use with Windows Server. So you can find all of that in here. Once you click down into those product pages, you can view details and see how much it is for each of those licenses. You can read the specs. You can get to all of Windows Server products. When you get into the Microsoft product catalog there is a drop-down box where you can select Microsoft Server, Software, and Licenses. Then there is also drop-down select Windows Server. This is standard right here. You can actually select when you install and download your license keys. You can download it for Windows Server 2016, or if there is a compelling reason that you need to have a prior version you can still get Windows Server 2012 as well. So these are available and you can see the license cows and there is a whole bunch more down the screen but I didn't capture the whole screenshot. But we have a guide to Microsoft Server Licensing. So for those of you who have questions about licensing and the different options available, I would recommend checking out this article that shows you the different options and kind of how it all works. You can learn more about the General Microsoft Donation Program as well. On our dedicated page, you can learn a little bit about it from a couple of our TechSoup staff people and get links directly to some of the products. I'm going to open up to questions. We have a lot in the queue, but just a couple of minutes left. So I'll try to ask a couple of quick ones. So Kim asked, is Virtual Server the same as Hyper-V? Oh wow, Virtual Server, I actually was the program manager for that way back when, back in 2005, Virtual Server is long ago. Virtual Server no longer exists. Hyper-V is what took over Virtual Server. And if you're familiar in any way with Virtual Server, I'm not sure how or why that context came up, but don't assume Hyper-V blows Virtual Server completely off the map. That was something literally we did back in 2005. I owned that for the first couple of releases. Hyper-V is a subsequent, and there are no comparisons. Hyper-V is what powers our global, worldwide, cloud-running millions of servers. And it's the same hypervisor we provide for you. At the end of the day, it's what allows you to run lots of virtual machines. It's actually built into Windows 10. I forgot to mention that. Hyper-V is actually built into Windows 10 so that you can create virtual machines on your laptop or your surface or whatever device. And then you can actually deploy them on Windows Server because the virtual machines are exactly the same. I also saw there was a question in the queue talking about disaster recovery. The question was, I believe this is from Kim, there was a question about backing up to a local server to Azure, and there was concern that backing up to acquiring the data from Azure to our local server is very slow and time-consuming. So one of the things, and this is always a challenge, is we can't ever take into account networking. And I'll be honest with you, I live in Redmond, and I happen to live in one little teeny-tiny corner of Redmond where my network connectivity is horrible. I actually have no wired networking to my house. I actually have satellites. So I can very much commiserate with someone who doesn't have the greatest network connectivity and basically saying, hey, I need to recover from a server that's gone down from Azure, and it's tough to do because my network connectivity is low. And if that's the case, then you know what? That could be a reason why you would actually continue to run Windows Server on-premises and honestly network connectivity should be a factor. If that's the case, in an easy way, there's a couple ways you could solve this. Number one would be to use storage replica which is built into Server 2016 and literally replicate between your two systems running side-by-side. Or if you're running all of your workloads in virtual machines, which you probably are, or if you're not, should consider doing, you could do that in Hyper-V. And Hyper-V has its own feature called Hyper-V replica. In fact, one of the things that we found out, and we've just received money, I'm glad you brought this up, is we've seen this a lot in nonprofits, public libraries, and schools where people say, Jeff, I've only got two servers in my school. And what we've done is we've partnered with another school that's literally 20 miles away. And I actually spoke to one of these last year and they were in Tornado Alley in Nebraska. And they said, Jeff, every so often we get these terrible tornadoes. And so we actually do replicate our virtual machines. We pair up with other schools. With Hyper-V replica, we actually, they configure it so they replicate to another school. And the school on the other end replicates to them. So if either school is impacted by a tornado, guess what? Their data is up and running and ready to go. Now in your case, your network sounds like it's, I'm not sure where the bottle neck is, but what you could do is you could actually set up two servers in your same location and maybe put them on opposite sides of the office or something like that. Or literally, if you're just worried about a server dying, you could put them right next to each other. But literally replicate all your VMs from one server to the next. So if one of them died, guess what? You would literally turn off server one and start running from server two. So that's a feature called Hyper-V replica. And I would urge you to take a look at that. Great. Thank you for that, Jeff. We are actually over time at this point. So I'm going to move us forward. I'm sorry we didn't get too many of the questions, but we will share the resources that Jeff had on his slide. And I will include some resources like to that licensing article on our site and additional things to hopefully answer some of the questions that have been asked that we weren't able to get to. We would love it if you'd chat in one thing that you learned during today's webinar that you are going to try to implement or go look into more or maybe something that you were excited just to learn about that, hey, this program does this thing I had no idea about. And we'd also like to ask that you'd share this today's webinar with any of your friends or colleagues in your network who may benefit from it. Before we wrap up, I'd like to go ahead and just highlight that we're also offering courses through TechSoup. We have a course catalog at techsoup.course.tc slash catalog where you can see courses that are available to you free and low cost on everything from introductory basics on Adobe Photoshop or InDesign to technology planning and training yourself on technology. So we'd love it if you'd go and check those courses out because they are available to you to do at any time. You don't have to come at a certain time of day. You can access them 24-7 and increase your knowledge and learning. We'd also like to invite you to come join us for upcoming webinars and events. We'll have another webinar this week on Adobe Acrobat Pro DC and things that you maybe didn't even know that Acrobat could do on Thursday. We'll talk about how to find local tech experts in your area next Thursday. And then we'll have a series of webinars on GrantStation and Grant Writing. So for those of you who are in development or have colleagues in development, feel free to share info about those. If you're joining us from a museum or historical site, we'll have a webinar focused on how we can help you on February 1. And then we'll be talking about increasing library staff IT ability in February. So please join us for these events and others. You can check out our archives for more. Thank you so much, Jeff. Really appreciate you giving up this time today to share all of this great information. We know it was a lot to cover in 90 minutes, but I think there are a lot of different areas that were highlighted that if you're interested in pursuing Windows Server or looking at upgrading, hopefully there's a lot of information that can help you move forward to do that. If you heard this information and thought, gee, you know what, I think I just need to go to the cloud. I need to get to Office 365 or maybe I'll check out Azure instead. Then we're glad if you've learned that. Either way, we want to make sure that you're finding the resources and applications that are serving your needs best. So thank you lastly to Susan and to our webinar sponsor, ReadyTalk, for providing the use of their platform. Please take a moment and complete that post-event survey when you log out. Thank you all so much for joining us. Have a great day. Bye-bye.