At this past BUILD Conference in Anaheim CA Microsoft released the details of the next release of the Windows Server operating system currently known as Windows Server 8. Here are some of of the highlights in the new Windows Server 8 operating system.

• New multi-server capable Server Manager
• Server Core will be the default installation
• The GUI is now considered a feature which enables you to perform your initial server configuration using the GUI then remove it when you’re readily to move into production.
• Storage pools enable you to group together individual disks
• Thin provisioning and storage deduplication are provided out of the box
• New support for continuously available file shares with SMB 2.2
• Clusters support 63 nodes and 4000 VMs
• Support for installing SQL Server databases on file shares
• Hyper-V 3.0 in Windows Server 8 will support hosts with up to 160 logical CPUs and up to 2 TB RAM.
• Hyper-V 3.0 VMs will support up to 32 virtual CPUs with up to 512 GB RAM per VM providing much greater scalability for your SQL Server virtual machines.
• Live Migration in Hyper-V 3.0 supports multiple concurrent Live Migrations
• Live Migration without the requirement for shared storage between the different virtualization hosts
• Live Storage Migration enables you to move a virtual machine’s configuration, virtual hard disk and snapshot files to a new location without incurring any downtime for the VM.
• Network virtualization enables multiple virtual networks on the same networking hardware
• Hyper-V Replica  will provide support for built-in asynchronous replication of Hyper-V VMs
• Built-in NIC Teaming works across multiple heterogonous vendor NICs