Ned Pyle has a comprehensive blog post that guides you through the important new stuff revealed at BUILD for IT Pros in Windows Server 8. Go read his blog post Windows 8 for the IT Pro: The New Plumbing.
If, like me, you want to start your reading with the Hyper-V stuff, here is the clip from his post to quickstart:
Virtualization, Networking, & High Availability
Enjoy. Thank Ned and leave a comment on his post if you feel inclined.
At the Build conference Windows Server 8 demo, Bill Laing crammed 7 demos into his session.
Here’s the skip-to guide (all times are *ish*):
VM Scale skip to timecode 7:00
Guest NUMA-8:00
Virtual SAN – 9:00
Live Migration of VM without shared storage/SAN/Clustering – 11:00
Network stuff (tasty) - 14:00
Virtual Switch (teaser) – 26:00
New multi-machine management UI (snover-licious) – 29:00
Windows PowerShell automation – 34:00
“workflows” – 36:00
Storage
Data dedupe and SMB – 38:00
Hybrid apps – 50:00
At the Build conference last week, Bill Laing, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft's Server and Cloud business, opened the conversation with his blog post Windows Server 8: An Introduction. More info is at Windows Server 8.
Bill is hosting the conversation over on the Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform blog. Laing said “I’ve asked some of our engineering leaders to write posts on this blog to further explain some of the hundreds of new features. Be on the lookout for those posts in the coming weeks and months.” Watch that space, subscribe to the RSS feed to catch the new info soonest.
You can catch the video of Bill’s keynote over at Windows Server 8 | BUILD2011 | Channel 9.
Infoworld gives their top 10 list at 10 best new features of Windows Server 8.
Some I think are important include:
Ever wanted to create your own collection of technical documentation on the fly as you look for information on the TechNet Library? Now you can.
Microsoft has released a beta version of the Print/Export Multiple Topics tool (winning tool name, eh?). This is a special view of the TechNet Library that allows you to select articles, group them in a collection that persists across web sessions (requires sign in), and then print them or export them to a file. This tool requires at least Internet Explorer 8, or the latest versions of other major browsers.
To try the tool:
1. Go to the TechNet Library: in my case the URL is http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/default.aspx
2 Sign in. (required to print and persist your collection across web sessions)
3. Click Lightweight view
4. Search/find a library article you would like to add to your collection. In my case, I’ll use the Best Practice Analyzer for Hyper-V page, because the page also shows links to other BPAs (that collection would look nice on my mantle-piece).
5. Click the small icon next to the printer icon in the top right corner of your screen
Note: If you are using IE9, and you do not see the icon,
Click the Compatibility View button in IE
6. Click Print Multiple Topics
7. Click Start. A new toolbar will appear in the web page. Browse as you normally do, with the toolbar activated.
New toolbar:
8. Add articles or topics to your collection:
In my case, I am going to add all those other BPAs:
9. Click Collection.
Review and rearrange your collection's content as it makes sense to you and then print or export. You can export to HTML* or PDF.
* If you export to HTML with the intention of accessing the pages offline, make sure you choose "save as Web Archive (.mht)" or "Webpage complete" in your browser when you save the generated document. Note that web browsers work best with small HTML pages, so HTML format is not recommended for large collections.
In my case, I’ll try .PDF for my collection of BPA articles, and then I’ll click Generate.
11. A few seconds later, I have my file, and I right-click to download it.
Give it a try. We hope you like it. Please send feedback/suggestions to bacfback@microsoft.com, or post as comments on this blog.