Microsoft have released a new build of Windows 10 Server for Windows Insiders. Build 16257 of the server OS is available for testing from Microsoft with the following activation codes:

  • Server Datacenter Core: B69WH-PRNHK-BXVK3-P9XF7-XD84W
  • Server Standard Core: V6N4W-86M3X-J77X3-JF6XW-D9PRV

I will be interested to know if any readers are going be testing the Insiders builds of Windows Server for their home media servers, let me know if you are testing it.

Here are the release notes for this build (via Microsoft):

General Scenario Highlights

Developers and Containers:

New base container images (available on Windows Insider Docker Hub repo)

Optimized Nano Server base image (over 70% smaller)

The .NET team is providing a preview image based on Nano Server with .NET Core 2.0

The PowerShell team is providing a preview image based on PowerShell 6.0

Optimized Server Core base image (over 20% smaller)

Support for SMB volume mounting

Infrastructure for Orchestrators

Networking enhancements for ongoing Kubernetes work

Named pipe mapping support

Bug fixes, performance enhancements

Cloud Guest:

IIS

TLS info: administrators can make specific recommendations to default to HTTPS

Disaster Recovery

Storage Replica Test Failover

Guest + Host better together

vPMEM in Guest: Tenants can use and manage PMEM/SCM

Tenant-Aware VM Start Ordering: App Ready / OS Heartbeat for better load balancing

Guest RDMA

Improvement in time accuracy

Azure enlightened clusters – optimized to run on Azure IaaS

Cloud Host:

Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) host

Security

Shielded Linux VM

SDN: Encrypted virtual networks

Secure clusters

SMB 1 disabled by default

Resiliency and Availability

SDN: Reduced downtime for tenant connections through gateways

Spaces Direct: Scoped Spaces to mitigate impact of multi-node loss

Spaces Direct: Marginal drive handling for predictive detection of drive failures

Efficiency

Data Deduplication available for ReFS

New Data Deduplication DataPort API for optimized ingress/egress

Space efficiency with ReFS Compaction

Performant Spaces Direct Multi Resilient Volumes (MRV)

Hyper-converged Scale

Cluster Sets: Significantly increases hyper-converged SDDC cloud scale by grouping multiple clusters into a larger fabric

Hardware support

Support for Storage Class Memory (SCM) in Spaces Direct

What’s New in Build 16257 for Windows Server

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is available on Windows Server

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is now available on Windows Server along with a compliment of Linux distributions.

Test WSL on Windows Server.  WSL runs unmodified Linux (ELF64) binaries natively.  With the additions of WSL you can run node.js, Ruby, Python, Perl, Bash scripts or other tools that expect Linux behaviors, environment, or filesystem-layout, the ability to install and run Linux with WSL expands the tools at your disposal on Windows Server.

At this time, WSL does not support persistent Linux services (such as daemons and jobs) as background tasks. To enable WSL and install a Linux distribution, see Enable the Windows Subsystem for Linux and Install a Linux distribution in the Windows Server 2016 Installation Guide on GitHub.

Read more in this blog or follow the installation guide to try it out.

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