Windows Server powers many of the worlds' largest datacenters, enables small businesses around the world, and delivers value to organizations of all sizes in between. Windows Server 2012 redefines the server category, delivering hundreds of new features and enhancements spanning virtualization, networking, storage, user experience, cloud computing, automation, and more. Simply put, Windows Server 2012 helps you transform your IT operations to reduce costs and deliver a whole new level of business value.

Windows Server 2012 RC:

Takes you beyond virtualization
Delivers the power of many servers with the simplicity of one
Opens the door to every app on any cloud
Enables the modern work style

The Windows Server 2012 product line-up has been streamlined and simplified, making it easier for customers to choose the edition that is right for their needs, based on the organization size and the requirements for virtualization and cloud computing.

Datacenter edition for highly virtualized cloud environments,
Standard edition for lightly virtualized environments progressing toward cloud,
Essentials edition for an ideal cloud-connected first server, and
Foundation edition for an economical general purpose server.

Windows Server 2012 includes a robust set of technologies for optimum flexibility.

Server Virtualization

Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V provides a complete virtualization platform, providing increased scalability and performance with an elastic and flexible solution from the datacenter to the cloud. It’s now easier than ever for organizations to realize cost savings from virtualization and to optimize server hardware investments.
VDI

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure in Windows Server 2012 makes it possible for users to access IT from virtually anywhere on popular devices, providing them a rich Windows experience while ensuring enhanced data security and compliance.
Networking

Windows Server 2012 provides an array of new and enhanced features that help reduce networking complexity, making it easier to connect users to IT resources, efficiently manage your datacenter and private clouds, and easily link your infrastructure with public cloud services.
Identity and Access

Windows Server 2012 makes it easier for administrators to protect corporate resources, build strong data access management and protection, and simplify the deployment of identity management infrastructure.
Storage

Windows Server 2012 provides greater efficiency, performance, and innovation through diverse storage choices. New features and enhancements for disk, network, and storage area network storage solutions provide greater choice and flexibility while ensuring high availability and uptime.
Server Management and Automation

Windows Server 2012 offers excellent total cost of ownership as an integrated platform with comprehensive, multi-server manageability that provides increased management efficiency, simplified deployment of servers and server roles, and resilient automation.
Web and Application Platform

Windows Server 2012 provides enormous flexibility through hybrid, symmetrical, and web-based applications on-premises and in the cloud, increased scalability and elasticity for applications, and enhanced support for open frameworks and open source.

Benefits

Windows Server 2012 brings Microsoft’s experience building and operating public clouds to customers running the Windows Server platform. It can help you deliver and manage a cost-effective IT infrastructure–both physical and virtual. It provides a modern, open application platform for both today’s software applications and tomorrow’s hybrid cloud solutions. And it helps you provide users with access from almost anywhere and any device, giving them the flexibility to stay productive while on the go.

Cost-Effective Infrastructure

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V improves both scalability and performance. It helps you deliver a fully-isolated, multitenant environment that includes tools to help guarantee SLAs, enable chargebacks, and support self-service scenarios. With Windows Server 2012 Datacenter you can continually increase your VM density without additional licensing costs for virtualizing infrastructure and applications.

With Hyper-V Network Virtualization, you can also virtualize your networks and enable software-defined networking. This provides the flexibility to move networks freely within your datacenter or to a hosting provider without reconfiguration. It also provides network isolation among the VMs running on different virtual networks, enabling multitenant environments.

Windows Server 2012 provides new storage scenarios which offer high availability on industry-standard server hardware. Make the most of your storage by thin-provisioning and trimming VM storage, pooling diverse storage resources, and abstracting them for flexible usage throughout your environment. Use file servers as file-based network storage for application data—now with the high levels of performance and reliability those scenarios require.

Modern App Platform

Windows Server 2012 is a broad, scalable, and elastic server platform that gives you the flexibility to build, deploy, and manage applications and websites on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment, using a consistent set of tools and frameworks.

Programming consistency and common development tools between Windows Server 2012 and Windows Azure can help ease the transition to the cloud, while enabling hybrid applications across on-premises, service provider, and Windows Azure clouds.

Windows Server 2012 provides frameworks, services, and tools to help increase scalability and elasticity for applications that support multitenancy, and improve website density and efficiency. This both benefits IT professionals in traditional datacenters and also helps service providers to more effectively build, provision, and manage hosting environments.

Windows Server 2012 offers enhanced support for open frameworks, open source applications, and development languages. Web standards, PHP, and node.js are supported, while .NET Framework 4.5 offers features and improvements such as support for asynchronous file operations, web, and networking enhancements.

Anywhere Access

The modern workstyle is defined by flexibility in how and where users access their data and applications. In Windows Server 2012, centralized desktops and remote access solutions have been made easier to deploy and to manage, providing an easier way to give users more secure access to corporate infrastructure.

Windows Server 2012 enables a personalized, rich user experience from many more devices while adapting to different network conditions quickly and responsively. Remote users can change locations or devices while maintaining an experience close to that of a laptop or PC, enabling them to maintain their productivity.

Windows Server 2012 features intelligent security infrastructure that helps you enhance data security and compliance with granular access to data based on strong identity and device security status. These features also enable flexible and powerful audit rules, which help achieve compliance with applicable regulations.

Better uptime

There are a number of features in Server 2012 that can significantly improve the resilience of an organization’s applications, whether they’re deployed in a data center or on a couple of servers in the back room. Improvements in Hyper-V virtualization, storage functionality, and the networking features of Server 2012 all add ways to make servers less likely to fail—and in the event that they do, make it easier to quickly recover.
The improvements to Hyper-V over the last version of the hypervisor are legion. Hyper-V is almost a platform to itself as a result—and in fact, the free Hyper-V Server, available as a download from Microsoft, offers all of the same features as the hypervisor environment in Server 2012, minus the management tools. For small organizations, a single copy of Server 2012 could be used to configure and manage multiple standalone Hyper-V servers to create a cluster of servers—even Linux-based server instances—configured for automatic failover.

Server 2012 also provides for a number of types of replication between servers to improve the availability and uptime of data. One of these is through Server 2012’s Distributed File Services’ Replication Groups, which can synchronize data from point to point, in a mesh or hub-spoke arrangement. This can be used to back up user files offsite or to multiple backups, and can be configured to use a set amount of bandwidth or replicate only at certain times of the day.

There are two other storage features in Server 2012 that are aimed at making it easier to prevent a loss of data in the first place. First, there’s the Resilient File System (ReFS), the new server file system, designed to minimize the potential for disk corruption caused by power failures by using the same “copy on write” approach used by the ZFS file system developed by Sun Microsystems.
There’s also a new feature in Server 2012, called Storage Spaces, that turns collections of inexpensive SATA and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) hard drives into a kinder, gentler sort of software-driven RAID. Storage Spaces allows administrators to create “pools” of physical disks that can be grouped together to create virtual disks set for a specific level of redundancy, and grown elastically by the addition of more disks. Disks’ partitions can be split up across multiple virtual drives, and multiple heterogeneous disks—even SSDs and traditional hard disks—can be aggregated and mapped to a single virtual drive.

Server 2012 brings so much to the table that it should be quickly picked up by small and mid-size organizations trying to make themselves look bigger from an IT perspective.

Download : http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/windows-server/trial.aspx

Source : http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/windows-server/default.aspx
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/windows_server_2012_first_look/