Being a server OS, Microsoft invested quite heavily in speeding up network performance and robustness. D-VMQ (Dynamic Virtual Machine Queue) helps avoid CPU bottlenecks in high-bandwidth situations by effectively aligning the network traffic to processor cores -- you'll end up using only a fraction of the original CPU performance under high bandwidth usage. Second, the overall prioritization of traffic has been improved, with the admin being in full charge of dynamically reserving bandwidth for particular traffic. Second, the new "NIC Teaming" feature allows you to combine adapters and essentially scale network performance with every NIC that gets added (e.g., get two 10 GB NICs and essential drive 20 GB down the lines). What's really interesting about this is the fact that you can combine NICs from different vendors (e.g. Broadcom or Intel).

In the reliability department, Windows Server 8's team has also done its homework: "DHCP Failover," which previously was left to 3rd party vendors and essentially left out of Windows Server 2008 R2. Now it's built right into Windows Server 8: it allows you to easily specify a secondary DHCP server, which immediately takes over on fails.

Remotely logging on to a client over WAN (even LAN or via mobile broadband) had its drawbacks: lags, dropped video and slow file transfers. Remote FX has also been improved massively: Windows Server 8 automatically detects what type of content gets transferred over the remote connection and chooses the right codec (e.g. for text, images, videos -- h.264 is the key). RFX adapts to the current situation and reduces the bandwidth load drastically; depending on what type of content you're generally accessing remotely, you can expect a reduction of bandwidth of up to 90%.