This summer, Microsoft introduced Windows Server 2022, which comes with a slew of new capabilities and is ready to take on production workloads. What’s new in the most recent release of Windows Server? Let’s have a look at what we’ve got.
New network protocols
It’s no surprise that performance is a primary priority for Microsoft in Windows Server. The majority of people who use Windows Server do so to host important business services and applications that serve workers or customers directly. Time is money in any instance, and the platform on which your key systems run must be both stable and efficient.
In Windows Server 2022, Microsoft has made some major networking enhancements. To begin, the Google-developed Quick UDP Internet Connection (QUIC) protocol has been implemented, which improves UDP connections in a variety of ways, including encryption, decreased latency, connection reuse, version control, and extension frames. UDP also receives some love from UDP Segmentation Offload (USO) and UDP Receive Side Coalescing (UDP RSC), both of which offloads a lot of the work of assembling UDP packets from CPUs to network devices that implement the protocols.
SMB over QUIC provides a number of potential advantages for business networks, but the most exciting is its ability to provide secure file access. TLS 1.3 tunnels SMB over QUIC communication over port 443 (HTTPS) rather than port 445 (SMB), and all SMB traffic is confined within the tunnel, so none of it is exposed to the network. SMB over QUIC is a good choice for mobile consumers or enterprises with strict security needs because of these features.
By Windows Server 2022, TCP connections aren’t left out in the cold. RACK monitors retry efforts and help minimize Retry Timeouts, while the HyStart++ standard helps reduce packet loss during connection starting, especially in high-speed networks (RTO). In Windows Server 2022, both functionalities are enabled by default.
Storage security and performance
Many of Windows Server’s storage enhancements prioritize security above speed. These include encryption for high-performance network-based storage utilizing SMB Direct and RDMA, as well as AES-256 cryptographic suites for SMB. These enable encrypted communication for applications that need a lot of processing power, such as Storage Spaces Direct, Hyper-V, and Scale-out File Server, to name a few. SMB over QUIC is also supported by Windows Server Datacenter: Azure Edition, completing the security, reliability, and performance trifecta.
Additionally, SMB compression is available. It lets a user, administrator, or program request that data being sent over the network be compressed in transit, eliminating the need to build a Zip file manually prior to transfer. Compressing and decompressing the data takes a slight penalty on both ends’ CPU speed, but it’s well worth it, especially on networks with limited bandwidth, such as Wi-Fi or even 1Gbps Ethernet.
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