Introduction

At Microsoft Ignite 2018 in Orlando last week, Microsoft announced that Windows Server 2019 will be generally available this month. And today, on October 2nd 2018, the Windows Server team is proud to publicly announce the GA release of Windows Server 2019.

Windows Admin Center (WAC) connects to many Azure services like Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery and Azure File Sync, together with Windows Server 2019 becomes a powerful platform to run your workloads on-premises or in the cloud.

What’s new in Windows Server 2019

Windows Server 2019 builds on the foundation of Windows Server 2016. Microsoft designed and engineered Windows Server 2019 to help modernize your datacenter, delivering on four key areas:

• Hybrid: Hybrid Cloud is built in to Windows Server 2019 and Windows Admin Center (WAC). To make it easier to connect existing Windows Server deployments to Azure services, Microsoft built interfaces for hybrid capabilities into the Windows Admin Center (WAC).
• Security: With the security threats growing in number and becoming more and more sophisticated, Microsoft continues to keep a persistent focus on security. The approach to security is to Protect, Detect, and Respond.
• Hyper-Converged Infrastructure: Windows Server 2016 introduced Storage Spaces Direct a new Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) that is a game-changer. In Windows Server 2019, Microsoft democratizes HCI with cost-effective high-performance software-defined storage and networking that allows deployments to scale from small 2-node, all the way up to hundreds of servers with Cluster Sets technology, making it affordable regardless of the deployment scale.
• Application platform: Windows Server 2016 introduced Windows Server Containers and Hyper-V Containers. Containers are changing the way developers and operations teams on how to run applications. It is now possible to run Windows and Linux-based containers on the same container host, using the same docker daemon. This enables you to have a heterogeneous container host environment while providing flexibility to application developers.

Download Windows Server 2019

You can download Windows Server 2019 evaluation bits from the following link:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-server-2019

Windows Server 2019 is also available to download through Azure Marketplace or Volume Licensing Service Center (VLSC).

Later this month, Microsoft will be adding Windows Server 2019 to Visual Studio Subscription, and the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN).

If you are wondering what about System Center 2019 release? Microsoft confirmed that System Center 2019 will be generally available in the first half of calendar year 2019.

Until then… Enjoy Windows Server 2019 and Happy Evaluating!

__
Thank you for reading my blog.

If you have any questions or feedback, please leave a comment.

-Charbel Nemnom-