Bill Laing, Corporate VP for Server and Cloud, just announced the availability of Windows Server 2012 Beta. That means you can now install this pre-release version of the OS, which brings a number of Storage and Continuous Availability enhancements. We started talking about those back in the //build conference in September, but now it’s your time to experiment with it yourself. You can read more about those enhancements in the blog post by Thomas Pfenning (General Manager, Server and Tools).

I’m obviously interested in the SMB 2.2 File Server features. After working on this for the last couple of years, I’m glad you can now enjoy the new Continuously Available File Server first hand and try the new Hyper-V over SMB scenario. More blogs posts are coming, but I would like to highlight that TechNet now includes new content on the Windows Server 2012 beta. Here are a few pointers to pages covering specifically the new version of the File Server:

• Windows Server 2012 Beta, File and Storage Services, SMB 2.2
• High-Performance, Continuously Available File Share Storage for Server Applications
• Deploying Fast and Efficient File Servers for Server Applications
• File Server for Scale-out Application Data
• Building Your Cloud Infrastructure: Converged Data Center with File Server Storage
• SMB Direct - SMB over RDMA
• Understanding and Troubleshooting Scale-out File Servers in Windows Server 2012 Beta
• New WMI classes for SMB Management

That’s it for now. Grab some coffee, download the bits, read the posts and start up the machines on your test lab. This is going to be fun…