Move to Server 2012 seeking tips for justification

[speckytecky]

We currently have a six year old 32 bit Dell T610 running the standard edition of Server 2008 as our DC / Fileserver and associated roles. I'm currently writing a paper to the SMT to justify replacing it with a blade server running Server 2012 with Hyper-V. Any tips on what to include in my case would be much appreciated along with suggested specification and suggestions on what to make Virtual. We are a Special EBD school currently with under 100 KS3/4 students. Currently there is 450GB of data on the Fileserver which has a separate 50GB partition for the OS which now has less than 5GB of free space. Back up is currently to LTO 4. We have a separate Office Managemrnt server and a dedicated Remote Desktop Server. Edited May 13, 2015 by speckytecky
Added Virtual advice seek.

[rich_tech]

New Features Windows Server 2012 R2 | Windows Server 2012 content from Windows IT Pro - thats a list of features, not sure if any of them benefit you, but if theres killer features in there you may use them as justification. Does 2008 standard support deduplication I know R2 does ? that could be justification alone if your staff make multiple copies of files all over the place, It saved me about 95gb of data on our media drive the other day when I ran it.

 

Personally I would say its better to get them upgraded from 2008 which is Vista based to the new all singing all dancing 2012R2

[gmonks]

Deduplication is a good one, we have saved over 50GB.

[Arthur]

See also: What's New in Windows Server. This also covers new features added in Server 2012 in addition to 2012 R2.

 

There are a huge number of new features that would be useful such as data duplication and the ability to expand or shrink virtual machines while they are still running.

 

Moving to 2012 R2 is a no brainer IMO, especially since Server 2008 (a.k.a. Vista Server) has already entered the extended support phase.

[Sagima]

Deduplication and Work Folders instead of Offline Files (if you have the same affection for offline files that I do) for fileservers and all the hyper-v stuff for VMs but especially live migration

[win]

2012r2 offers much better features in Hyper-v.

 

- live migration

- better virtual HDDs (vhdx)

- better virtual NICs (option to use physcial aspects of NIC)

 

Negatives is that 2012r2 is slightly more RAM hungry than 2008r2

[Duranis]

Does 2008 standard support deduplication I know R2 does ?

 

Does it? Sorry to go OT but anyone have a link for info as this would be very useful for me at the moment.

[pantscat]

Recovery time objective... to use a bit of word w*nk.

 

E.g. if your servers are Hyper-V VMs then it will take mere moments to restore them in the event of a hardware failure, and you can also temporarily (perhaps!) restore them to whatever hardware you've got lying around that will run Hyper-V.

[Tom91]

The fact the current server is 6 years old should be justification enough. Hardware failure could be just around the corner!

Warranty could be a justification, if something does fail you have that protection of warranty, but on a 6 year old machine, has the warranty expired?