Hello everyone, Justin Graham here again! We’ve been hard at work here in Redmond on Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. I'm happy to share today the Release Candidate (RC) of SP2 is available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers via the TechNet and MSDN websites! Next week, the RC of SP2 will be made available to the general public via the same web properties next week. I encourage you to download and install the RC build and give us feedback. We want to make sure Windows Server 2008 continues to be the best server operating system for your needs!

The next question is usually "what's in it for me?" We've made some great improvements in SP2, a few are:

· Easier Virtualization: Hyper-V RTM is in the Service Pack. That’s right, you no longer have to download and install it separately

· More Green: increased power efficiency through improved processor power management

· Unified: We will be delivering one package for 32-bit and one package for 64-bit that cover both Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. Less packages, less testing, easier deployment for IT Administrators

If you want the full list of improvements, please download and read the Notable Changes document

Happy downloading and testing everyone! As you know, changes to our product are based on feedback, so please share your thoughts with us.

Thanks,

Justin Graham

Windows Server Team

You may have heard that earlier today Steve Ballmer referenced we are working on an addition to the Windows server Family named Foundation Server.

While we don’t have any details to share now, we are very excited about the opportunity this entry-level server will bring to our customers and partners. 

Look for more information coming in the next few months!   

Cross your fingers.  Rub your lucky rabbit’s foot.  Pray to the server gods.  It won’t happen to you, right? 

But what if it does happen?  And the servers are down... 

Maybe you can help save your company from some of the heartache and costs of downtime.

Failover Clustering has been around a long time now (since Wolfpack, for those who remember), and, well... maybe it had a reputation for being a bit arcane to set up and configure.  But that’s really ancient history at this point.  With Windows Server 2008 Enterprise (or R2) and a couple of servers you're just seven clicks away from a cluster. 

Don’t worry – you will still have the control of your cluster you expect and require.  We’ve just simplified and automated setup and management – improving the interfaces you can focus on managing your applications, not your cluster.

Certification and support of your cluster are simpler now, too.  Do the hardware components of the cluster have the Certified for Windows Server logo?  (Most server hardware does.)  If so, just run the included validate tool – if it passes, you’re supported.  Or use its extensive reporting to help identify and correct potential problems.

Want to know before you buy that you’ll end up with a supported cluster that works?  You can easily identify pre-tested and certified server configurations on vendor websites through the Failover Clustering Configuration Program. 

Clustering isn’t just for large corporations, high-end servers, or specialists – not any more.  IT professionals in organizations of all sizes who want to avoid the pain of a service disruption can potentially benefit from failover clustering. 

So while you might try the other techniques in this article's title, I'd suggest exploring Windows Server Failover Clustering.

-Dan Reger

Sr. Product Manager

P.S.  Failover clustering is available in the Enterprise, Datacenter, and for Itanium-Based Systems editions of Windows Server 2008 (and, of course, in the R2 beta available now).  To learn more click here.  Looking for introductory technical information?  Try here.  For the cluster team’s blog and more details on clustering features in Windows Server 2008 R2 click here .

You read that right. All MIX09 attendees will receive a fully functional copy (the real deal) of Windows Web Server 2008 at no cost. That’s nearly a $500 value!

Windows Web Server 2008 is a robust and reliable foundation on which to develop, deliver, and manage rich user experiences and applications. Designed to be used as an Internet-facing Web server, Windows Web Server 2008 is a great choice for hosting the Microsoft Web Platform and you can be up and running in no time with the latest version of the Web Platform Installer.

Featuring Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0, Windows Web Server 2008 delivers a modular and extensible Web server for developers and designers of innovative Web sites. IIS Extensions bring additional functionality to Windows Web Server 2008 and the Microsoft Web Platform by offering new and more powerful ways to develop, deploy, and manage your Web applications, including ASP.NET and PHP.

Eric Rezabek

Senior Product Manager

IIS/Web

The old IIS Extensions train keeps on rollin’. Last month we hit RTW with the Web Platform Installer V1.0 (Why do we call it V1.0? Just wait until you see V2.0) and as you know, Web PI is the one-stop shop for discovering, downloading and installing the various components of the Microsoft Web Platform, be they application server modules, drivers, tools or IIS extensions. And while you’re over checking that out, take a look at the new version of Microsoft.com/Web, which provides a lot more detail on why the Microsoft Web Platform is the software of choice for building Web applications and solutions. It also has a pretty flower, which we thought was kinda apt for Valentine’s Day.

And so to today’s news, where two more IIS extension release updates join the fold, to help manage distributed Web server farms and to better protect those servers against unauthorized access or malicious requests: Application Request Router and IIS Dynamic IP Restrictions.

ARR, now reaching it’s RTW milestone, enables Web server administrators and hosting providers to increase Web application scalability and reliability through rule-based routing and load balancing of HTTP server requests. With ARR, administrators can optimize resource utilization for application servers, and so reduce management costs for Web server farms and shared hosting environments. Show me the money! The RTW version of ARR is fully supported and production ready, and adds new functionality since the Release Candidate, including:

• An improved way to allocate and identify servers for host name affinity by including 2 providers: one based on round robin and the other based on memory consumption, to more evenly distribute the “load” across shared servers
• Greater integration with IIS Manager, including the ability to manually override health statuses and configure HTTP and HTTPS ports for the application servers
• Performance improvements in least response time load balancing algorithm

The other release we have today is a newcomer to the extensions stable – the beta of IIS Dynamic IP Restrictions. This extension provides IT Professionals and hosting providers with a configurable module that can help mitigate or block Denial of Service attacks or the cracking of passwords through brute-force methods. It does this by temporarily blocking IP addresses of HTTP clients who follow a pattern that could be indicative of such an attack. This module can be configured at the Web Server or the Web Site level for analyzing and blocking potentially malicious requests.

IIS Dynamic IP Restrictions integrates into IIS Manager and extends the existing IP Restrictions functionality, maintaining support for the functionality already provided by IPv4 Address and Domain Restrictions and also adding new support for IPv6 addresses. As a result, IT Administrators can build and use a static list of IP addresses and domain names that are denied or granted access, while still restricting suspicious IP addresses dynamically based on behavior. Learn more about how to use this new extension, try it out, and of course, let us know how you get on.

David Lowe.