This edition is designed for highly virtualized datacenter and cloud environments, offering unlimited virtualization and full enterprise-scale server capabilities.
Key Features & Capabilities
Unlimited Virtualization
- Once all physical cores are licensed, you can run an unlimited number of virtual operating system environments (OSEs) (i.e., VMs) on that host.
- Also supports unlimited Windows Server containers with or without Hyper-V isolation.
Core-Based Licensing
- Licensed per physical core.
- Minimum requirement: 8 core licenses per physical processor and 16 core licenses per server.
- Core license packs are typically sold in 2-core or 16-core packs.
Advanced Security
- Secured-core server: Hardware-rooted security to protect against firmware-level attacks.
- Support for Shielded Virtual Machines: Helps protect VMs from unauthorized access.
- TPM 2.0 and UEFI Secure Boot support for enhanced security features.
Software-Defined Networking (SDN)
- Virtual network virtualization and software-defined networking features are available in the Datacenter edition.
Storage Enhancements
- Storage Spaces Direct (S2D): Enables building highly available, scalable storage using local disks.
- Storage Replica: For synchronous/asynchronous replication of volumes.
Hybrid and Cloud-ready
- Deep integration with Azure: Useful for hybrid deployments.Hotpatch support (Azure Edition): Ability to apply certain patches without rebooting (when using Azure-optimized VMs).
Scalability and Performance
- Supports very large server configurations: up to 2048 logical processors per host.
- Designed to handle business-critical and large-scale workloads reliably.
