Microsoft officially releases Windows Server 2016

Microsoft has made the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) versions of Windows Server 2016 and System Centre 2016 officially available to enterprise customers.

As revealed at its recent Ignite conference, Windows Server 2016 customers will also receive the commercial version of Docker at no additional cost.

There are a number of Windows Server 2016 editions offered, including Datacenter, Essentials, Hyper-V Server, MultiPoint Premium Server, Standard and Storage Server.

The Datacenter and Standard versions will carry per-core licensing, while Essentials, MultiPoint Premium Server, and Storage Server will have per-processor licensing.

With the Datacenter Edition, users will be able to run an unlimited number of operation system environments or Hyper-V containers. However, the Standard Edition will only allow its users to run two. That is not the only difference between them though.

The Datacenter Edition packs extra features such as Storage Spaces Direct and Storage Replica, Shielded virtual machines and a networking stack.

Windows Server 2016 is offered through MSDN and as a Microsoft Azure image, the latter of which is available for customers that want to run the operating system in the software giant's cloud platform. You can read more about the Microsoft Azure images in this blog post.

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