Exploring Windows 2019 Server

Wilson Chua
4 min readFeb 18, 2021

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Here are some of the things I liked about the new Windows 2019 Server.

  1. Smaller, More efficient containers (50–80% savings)
Windows 2019 bare, fully patched

Compared to Windows 2012 fully patched:

at 19.6 gb it is 2x the filesize of the windows 2019 above!

2. Better Integrated support for Linux

Exploring Windows Subsystem Linux | by Wilson Chua | Mar, 2021 | Medium

3. Better Security with:Windows Defender, Anti Ransomware features and security built-in

Windows Defender Antivirus is installed by default!

Anti RansomWare via [Controlled Folder Access]

(insert screenshots)

Attack surface reduction (ASR)

Network Protection (Smartscreen using reputation database to block traffic from reaching bad destinations) look into Settings/Windows Security Settings

Shielded VMs

Great for Domain controllers where you can restrict access to only from the console!

Hybrid Networks:

Enterprise Grade Software Defined Networking

Guest RDMA:

Transfers large data without affecting CPU https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-sg/000113009/how-to-configure-guest-rdma-on-windows-server-2019

High Performance Gateways (up to 3X faster in 2019)

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/networking-blog/top-10-networking-features-in-windows-server-2019-6-high/ba-p/339766

Egress Bandwidth Metering:

Virtual Network Encryption:

Support for Azure cloud (backup and restores)

Windows ADMIN Center

You have to download this and install it first.

Storage Class Memory

Storage Replica
Making cloned copy at the block level for data replication
New story — Medium

Storage Spaces Direct

Clustering tech and way to build an extremely efficient and redundant centralized network based storage platform

Systems Insight

We access this from the Windows Admin Center.

Disk Deduplication

You can enable this using Powershell:

Or via the Server Manager GUI :

And here is where you can see it at work:

Disk E: contents

Settings Menu

You can do most of what we usually do with Control Panel here:

Storage Migration Service

Migrate your windows 2003,2012,2016 to Windows 2019!
I wrote a more detailed story (https://wilson-chua.medium.com/migrating-windows-2012-to-windows-2019-using-storage-migration-service-9f0b8a992964)

Software Defined Networking using Windows Server Gateway (SDN Gateway)

Article to follow.

Support for Docker and Kubernetes

(article to follow) Moby VM, LCOW (need to add windows feature: Containers)

Nested VMs

Using windows powershell:
Set-VMProcessor -VMname <VMname> -ExposeVirtualizationExtensions $true

Get-VMNetworkAdapter -VMname <VMname> | Set-VmnetworkAdapter -MacAddressSpoofing On

Hyper-V replication and Fail over

Hyper-V Virtual Networks:

“Customers want to seamlessly extend their datacenters to the cloud. Today there are technical challenges in making such seamless hybrid cloud architectures. One of the biggest hurdles customers face is reusing their existing network topologies (subnets, IP addresses, network services, and so on.) in the cloud and bridging between their on-premises resources and their cloud resources.

Hyper-V Network Virtualization provides the concept of a VM Network that is independent of the underlying physical network.”

Source: Hyper-V Network Virtualization Overview in Windows Server | Microsoft Docs

My own notes: https://medium.com/p/6a2338a9a115

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Wilson Chua
Wilson Chua

Written by Wilson Chua

Data Analyst, Startup Founder, Tech Columnist

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