Active Directory Administrative Center
Newly updated in Windows Server 2012 and
built on PowerShell v3.0, the Active Directory Administrative Center is
a customizable console that an organization can create for specific
administrators in the organization. For example, an organization might
have an administrator who only needs to reset passwords, or another
administrator who only needs or manage print queues. Instead of giving
the administrator access to the full Active Directory Users and
Computers or Print Management consoles, an Active Directory
Administrative console can be created with just a task or two specific
to the administrator’s responsibilities.
The console is built on PowerShell, so
underlying the GUI consists of simple PowerShell scripts. Anything that
can be done in PowerShell on a Windows Server 2012 server can be
front-ended by the administration console.
Figure 2. Active Directory Administrative Center.
Windows Server
2012 provides several new benefits that help organizations better
administer their networking environment. These new features provide
better file and data management, better performance monitoring and
reliability tracking tools to identify system problems and proactively
address issues, a new image deployment tool, and a whole new set of
Group Policy objects that help administrators better manage users,
computers, and other Active Directory objects.
Storage Spaces
The Storage Spaces feature is new to Windows
Server 2012 and is the first time the basic file server file system has
had a major update in Windows in years. The Storage Spaces feature
makes it possible for the file share to span multiple drive shares and
multiple servers. Unlike in the past, when a file share was data and
directories on a single drive volume, now with Storage Spaces, the
share can span across two, three, or more volumes yet still appear to
be a single directory of files.
Organizations are using the Storage Spaces
feature to not only simply add on more storage as an existing drive
volume runs out of space, but also to mirror and stripe storage spaces
for higher redundancy and reliable of storage. By mirroring multiple
volumes, the storage space can be made redundant at the file system
level. Of course, organizations can also mirror hard drives inside a
server, so why are storage spaces any better? The real answer is that
storage spaces can be mirrored and striped across multiple servers.
By having multiple servers with mirrored
copies of the file system, the basic file server now has redundancy
spanning multiple servers. If one server with the storage space goes
offline, the other copy of the storage space continues to operate. Some
IT professionals familiar with Windows server technologies will wonder
how this differs from Distributed File System (DFS), which also enables
you to mirror storage and replicate information across multiple
servers. The big difference is that storage spaces appear as physical
drives to the local server (for example, D>, or local E>). Some
applications do not like a DFS share because it is seen as a network
share, and thus not available for local share functionality.
The Storage Spaces feature provides
yet another way for organizations to achieve higher availability and
redundancy of information without the need to purchase expensive SANs
or complicated shared-storage solutions. The Storage Spaces feature is
built in to Windows Server 2012 and provides organizations a simple
alternative to achieve many basic file storage requirements.
