We discussed Quality of Service (QoS) briefly in the previous chapter. QoS is not an entirely new feature in Windows Server 2012 and R2. However, its implementation and use cases have been extended to Hyper-V, and beyond. You came across the bandwidth management QoS feature for virtual machines in the previous chapter. However, there are more interesting updates on this aspect.

QoS is put to use to implement effective network traffic management in an environment, and to ensure that applications and users get the most out of the available bandwidth. Windows Server 2012 implemented QoS in much more innovative ways than just bandwidth control and manipulation. Apart from traffic control and admission control, QoS is utilized for the following goals:

Now, before you learn about the preceding features, let's look at one very important installable feature...