Today, Daniel van Soest and Rik van Berendonk visited the University of Groningen to play with Windows Server 2012 on some serious systems.

Serious systems

When I talk ‘serious systems’ I’m talking about a fully-fledged HP ProLiant DL980G7 and a Dell PowerEdge R910. The first system was equipped with 8 10-core processors (160 logical processors), 1TB RAM, a couple of disks and a total of 8 power supplies. The Dell system was equipped with a lot less logical processors (only 80) and the same amount of RAM, but in a redundant setup, totaling a mere 512GB.

Both systems were connected with 10Gb/s iSCSI to a Storage Area Network (SAN) containing SSDs, where we could play with two 800GB storage pools. This OCZ R4 Z-Drive RM88 was filled with a total of 1.6TB on MLC Nand flash PCI Express cards.

Serious systems, right?

On both servers we tested new Windows Server 2012 functionality, like Concurrent Live Migrations, NIC teaming, Dynamic Memory, Domain Controller Cloning and a lot of other functionality available through System Center 2012.

Task Manager

During our Dynamic Memory tests (not a new feature for Windows Server 2012, since this feature was introduced with Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1), we noticed something strange in Task Manager:

As you can clearly see, the Task Manager in Windows Server 2012 only shows 64 logical processors, while in the bottom right, Task Manager clearly shows we’re dealing with 160 logical processors. (coincidentally the maximum amount of logical processors in VMware’s ESX) Screenshots like the one from Intel a while ago, will not be possible with Windows Server 2012, although you might actually have a system with more than 256 processors in the foreseeable future…

Although above about the ‘new’ Task Manager, the ‘old’ Task Manager (still available through taskmgr.exe) offers the same functionality:

Concluding

Anyway, the new Task Manager looks WAY better, so I’m sticking with that.