Is Windows 8 family and/or Windows Server 2012 significantly differ

chopsticks

from Windows 7 and/or Server 2008 and earlier, in terms of internal Windows structures? Thanks.

it_consultant

Yes. The kernel is very similar but it has been significantly altered with security and stability improvements.

Windows Server 2012 is a whole different animal. It isn't that you won't recognize it as a Windows Server, but in terms of its offerings it is a nice incremental improvement over Server 2008R2.

In terms of virtualization technologies, Server 2012 is in a different league. It can support more processors, more memory, and larger VHD files (64TB as opposed to 2TB) than 08R2. It supports VM replication, running VMs from SMB 3.0 shares, live migration without shared storage, etc. The SMB 3.0 should be really exciting to everyone because it allows you to run HA with shared storage on the file level as opposed to block level. Read "limited need for SAN" in that statement. Instead of having a massive zone with hundreds of paths (multi path for each hyper-V host) you cluster 4 or 5 file servers instead and then run your HA environment on top of that.

There are other improvements like hardware independent NIC teaming with Hyper-V port built in. Improvements to Windows backup. Volume dedupe (extremely cool) and some other stuff. It seems like a very solid offering which should challenge both VMWARE and Red Hat in the enterprise.