Difference between Windows Server 2008 &

Windows Server 2012

By Praveen Kumar in Active Directory, Windows Server Installation on March 25, 2015.

Difference between Windows Server 2008 & Windows Server 2012

Below are the basic difference between windows Server 2008 and windows Server 2012

First we’ll discuss about the Hardware requirements and then we go through the Features

Hardware Specifications between these two

Processor/Memory Feature Windows Server 2012 Windows Server 2008 R2

RAM per VM 1TB 64GB
Virtual processors/VM 64 4
# of Active VMs 1,024 384
Virtual processors/VMs 64 4
Virtual processors/hosts 2,048 512
Maximum cluster nodes 64 16
Maximum cluster VMs 8,000 1,000
Physical Memory 4TB 1TB

Features which are supported in Windows Server 2012 and that are Not supported by windows
server 2008 as shown below:

New Features
Private VLAN Supported Not Supported
DHCP Guard Supported Not Supported
Router Guard Supported Not Supported
Hyper-V Extensible Switch Supported Not Supported
Extension Monitoring Supported Not Supported
IP Address rewrite Supported Not Supported
Generic Routing Encapsulation Supported Not Supported
Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) support
Supported Not Supported
inside VMs
Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) Supported Not Supported
Hyper-V Smart Paging Supported Not Supported
Resource Metering Supported Not Supported
Runtime Memory Configuration Supported Not Supported
Virtual Hard Disk format Supported Not Supported
Offload Data Transfer Supported Not Supported
Data Center Bridging Supported Not Supported
Virtual Fibre Channel in Hyper-V Supported Not Supported
QoS Minimum Bandwidth Supported Not Supported
Encrypted cluster volumes Supported Not Supported
Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) 2.0 Supported Not Supported
Application Monitoring Supported Not Supported
Storage Spaces Supported Not Supported
Data Deduplication Supported Not Supported
SMB Direct Supported Not Supported
Multi-terabyte volumes Supported Not Supported
SMB Transparent failover Supported Not Supported
Datacenter Diskless boot Supported Not Supported
SMB 3.0 Supported Not Supported
IPAM Supported Not Supported
Cross-premise connectivity Supported Not Supported
DHCP Failover Supported Not Supported
CPU Throttling Supported Not Supported
Active Directory based Authentication Supported Not Supported
Cloning virtual domain controllers Supported Not Supported
DirectAccess Supported Not Supported
Hyper-V Replica Supported Not Supported
Live Storage migration Supported Not Supported