As I'm sure you're perfectly well aware, Windows Server 2008 just shipped. Let's try that again: Windows Server 2008 just shipped! The server companion of the much criticized Window Vista.
It's been a 4 year journey for a lot of people in our organization. But it's finally out and you can now enjoy the fruits of our labor.
Windows Server 2008 is both and end-point as well as the first station in a longer journey. Let me elaborate a bit on that:
Windows Server 2008 is the last 32-bit server operating system from Microsoft.
We said it before, and we will say it again, the next version of Windows Server is going to a 64-bit release only. In fact Bob Muglia first announced this during IT Forum in Barcelona a couple of years ago. We want to make sure that our customers can take advantage of the good stuff that AMD and Intel put in their CPU's. And transitioning to 64-bit will allow you to run more on a Windows Server, it will allow us to continue to make Windows Server a more secure OS.
Windows Server 2008 is the first deliverable towards modularizing Windows Server for particular workloads.
We worked really hard to start the process of both provide a better layering of the OS as well as ensure that you can deploy Windows Server 2008 for a particular workload (such as Virtualization) and not have to content with the extra baggage of the stuff you don't want, this is referred to as Server Core. The Server Manager will go a long way towards make it very simple to do this.
Windows Server 2008 is the first deliverable towards making Windows Server the best virtualization platform.
Even though Hyper-V didn't make it onto the CD for the release, a lot of effort has gone into making sure that when it is released, it will fit perfectly. Indeed, there's even a Server Core role for Hyper-V. The initial feedback from both beta testers and reviewers looks very good, and we will continue to make Hyper-V the best it can be.
If you're interested in the the journey of Windows Server and why Windows Server 2008's called Windows Server 2008 SP1, here a link to a blog from Iain McDonald explaining it:
http://blogs.msdn.com/iainmcdonald/archive/2008/02/15/windows-server-2008-is-called-sp1-adventures-in-doing-things-right.aspx
You may remember a while back when I described my initial encounter with our newest Server product: Windows Home Server. Back then I was amongst the many hundred Microsoft people beta testing the product to make sure that our customers would get a solid product.
As I'm sure you realize, products are usually beta for a very good reason. And Windows Home Server (WHS) was no different. Although I never lost a single file during the beta process, I did have a couple of interesting challenges to deal with. One was the nasty bug, that placed a back up file in the wrong directory, which would send WHS in to a tizzy, completely halting the nightly backup, until this file was deleted.
This experience made me check the server console every night to make sure that nothing had gone wrong, and my heart would skip a beat (and I'd get one more gray hair) every time the WHS taskbar icon turned orange or (god forbid) red!
But, once I had removed the offending file, WHS would start it's back up of your 4 PC's again as if nothing had every been wrong. I liked the comfort this gave me. I also like the fact that I could access the server from outside my home through my firewall to check that nothing was wrong or to fix the occasional issue.
But by and large, I had few issues. In fact the only real big one was when time came to upgrade my home server from Beta 1 to the final released (RTM) version. Because of the funky RAID controllers I had and the fact that I had more that 12 hard drives, I couldn't upgrade the server, I had to re-install the server. Normally that is not an issue, but WHS formats the data drives when adding them to the drive array. For most this wouldn't be an issued and had I just used the server for backup, I wouldn't have issues with this either, but the fact of the matter was that I had about 2.4TB's worth of movies, music and photos. so I had to copy all that off the server, until I could upgrade.
All this is water under the bridge, it's all done now and I have our home server humming in our garage. One of the smartest things the WHS team did was to provide a programming model for WHS. this means that you can find WHS add-in's in healthy supply. My favorite on is Whiist. this sets up an automatic picture gallery server, without forcing me to do ANY HTML, VBS or javascript programming. I just set up the server in the console add-in (that plugs into WHS's console), point it to a folder on the server, copy a small application into the folder and Hey Presto, Photo gallery!
I have given my family back home access to the page (that WHS provides access to through my firewall). All I have do is to copy new pictures up to the designated folder and they can now browse the newest pictures of my family. Actually, I have a batch (robocopy) job that copies new pictures from a certain folder from my PC to our Media Center PC in our living room as well to the server, so as I make these pictures available to my immediate family, they automatically become accessible to my entire family as well as our friends.
this is way better than the tedious process of uploading pictures to MSN or Live etc.
And did I tell you about the backup? well, this is an area where WHS excels! Every night it backs up every PC in our house. Until a couple of days ago, I haven't had the opportunity to to try out it's restore capabilities. Of course, there's had been a couple of times where I had to restore individual files (like when I couldn't find the map for our PocketPC GPS system) and it's been a breeze to find these files.
But to the story I really wanted to share. I had long wanted to replace a systems drive on our Media Center PC. It's main drive was driving me nuts. It had this very distinct whine that I could hear across the room (and more importantly, my wife could too). I had already gotten a quieter drive, but the idea of re-installing the PC (Vista Ultimate) didn't appeal to me.
Well, the other day, I finally pulled the trigger on this whole exercise.
Based on the feedback from various co-workers (who had used WHS to recover a PC after a fatal hard drive crash), I decided to simply replace the hard drive and restore the Media Center PC from my daily back-ups from the server. This was possibly the easiest re-install I have ever been through! In fact the only hick-up was the fact that the WHS recover CD didn't have a driver for my Ethernet. I had to download that on another PC, put it on a USB stick and WHS could then read the driver from the USB stick.
Once the initial setup was done, WHS could start restoring the backup. Than took about 45 min for the 40GB partition that I have set aside for the system. After that the PC re-booted and behaved as if it had always run on that hard drive. I've had no issues since! I have been told that there's a know problem with Internet Explorer (if you need to print web pages), that creates a temp folder that never gets backed up by WHS (and subsequently doesn't get resorted). Although this can easily be fixed, it does seem less than smart that IE depends on a temporary folder that it doesn't recreate if it's not there, but I digress.
My next project is to re-build the PC in our den and, based on my success using WHS to restore my Media Center PC, I am absolutely going to use the same process for the next one!
Windows Home Server: I definitely owe you one!
Did you know that analysts are seeing that the combined cost of power and cooling in the Data Center is 10% of IT budgets today and expected to rise to about 50% in the next couple of years?
Recently, there's been a flurry of activities around Being Green and all the related issues around the world.
We are starting to see states in the US such as California considering legislation to force companies with large Data Center to consume less energy by providing both a Carrot and the Stick: If you deploy technologies such as Hypervisor and Virtual Machine technologies in general, you'll get a discount and if you consume more that a certain amount of power you'll pay more.....
Obviously, computers (OS's, hardware, clients and servers) are part of the problem and should be part of the solution.
You see companies such as Intel and AMD focusing on reducing their energy consumption and cooling "foot print", Hewlett-Packard and IBM focusing on providing solutions for controlling the energy consumption in the Data Center. Recently, here in the US AMD and other companies (including Microsoft) with like priorities created the "Green Grid" organization http://www.thegreengrid.org/home.
As a company we (Microsoft) need to ensure that our platform is the best "Green" citizen for a Power Management perspective. indeed, this is a priority for Windows Server moving forward. But it's not just in the future, we are taking steps now to address some of the issues and we'll continue down that path. This kind of functionality was first implemented in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 SP1.
Both Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 takes step to address the power consumption by implementing updated support for ACPI processor power management (PPM) features, including support for processor performance states and processor idle sleep states on multiprocessor systems. This paper provides details of the support in Windows Vista, describes how PPM works with Windows Vista power policy, provides guidelines to BIOS developers and system designers, and includes details on how Windows Vista may be tuned to optimize the balance between performance and power savings.
There's a white paper available on our web site that discusses Windows (Vista) Processor Power Management Functional Overview. This white paper describes the following:
- Processor Power Policy
- Implementing Processor Power Management for Windows (Vista)
- Processor Power Management Validation Tools
- Optimizing Processor Power Policy on Windows
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/pnppwr/powermgmt/ProcPowerMgmt.mspx
It's important to realize that this functionality applies equally to both Windows Vista as well as Windows Server 2008, and can be used to reduce the power consumption of the OS, whether on a laptop in an office or on a server in a rack in the data center.
Moving forward we need to address the policy aspect of power management (making sure servers go to sleep and wakes at the right time) as well as providing tools that allow our customers to better budget their power consumption in the offices as well as in the data center. this is both an OS as well as a management tools functionality. We also need to ensure that the industry agrees on how this is implemented in various OS's, management tools, rack system, servers, UPS's, etc.
In other words, we've only just begun.
Why should you care?
What is a Management Pack? What about Health Models? What's instrumentation good for? And, finally we should you care about all of it? ......
Let's take the last of my rhetorical question first: Why should you care? As an IT pro implementing Microsoft server products or 3rd party products running on Windows you need all the help you can get. I know how this sounds, but trust me, I'm not pointing fingers at any one, nor am I trying to patronizing anyone. With all the variables of setting up a server environment, it's complex enough, the last thing you need is to further add complexity by adding multiple server applications from both Microsoft and others to the mix. And, in case it's not completely clear, I'm referring to managing these applications.
Recent studies have shown that administration and management of server applications is increasing at a whopping 8 times the annual spend on the servers themselves. Some of that complexity comes from the fact that achieving scale (across many users and servers) is inherently complex, some of it comes from the fact that we all trying to solve these problems using whatever Shinny New Ultimate Technology that comes along. A good example of this is Virtualization. We are starting to see that our customers are using Virtualization as a means to consolidate the number of physical servers that they have in their datacenter onto bigger boxes. Now, using Virtualization doesn't necessarily solve the underlying problem (of managing many physical boxes) it simply consolidates many (virtual) instances of OS's and applications onto a smaller number of boxes. Unless you add Virtualization Management tools (such as the recently announced System Center Virtual Machine Manager) to the equation, you still have to care and feed the individual OS's and applications with regards to patches, etc. In other words, you have realized none of the benefits of scale and all of the issues, and you now have a potential single point of failure to boot!
So, you ask, what do we do to solve the issue? The real answer is instrumentation. Making sure that the applications themselves are more intelligently aware of their environment and are able to communicate the root cause of whatever problem arises to IT operations (through a management console). This leads us to my remaining two rhetorical questions around Management Pack and Health models.
Management Packs
Systems Center Operations Manager utilizes management packs to provide intelligent operations management for a wide variety of your server applications. Management packs monitor a wide array of server health indicators which enable them to call attention—often preemptively—to many critical events that require administrator intervention. Monitoring is augmented by in-depth knowledge base content associated directly with the relevant alerts included in the management pack module, providing prescriptive guidance for the administrator to quickly resolve outstanding alerts.
To provide the best possible management of your infrastructure, we encourages management packs to be developed by the application providers who have the knowledge to embed the necessary operational intelligence to aid you in maintaining your system.
In the Management Pack Catalog, you will find not only management pack provided by Microsoft, but a number of non-Microsoft management packs that allow MOM to manage a variety of other applications as well.
Management Packs in Operations Manager 2007 are XML based and use the Service Modeling Language (SML) language to define health models and store knowledge documents in XML.
Health Models
Health models define what it means for a system and its components to be healthy or unhealthy, and define how a system and its components move in and out of these states. Good information about a system’s health is necessary for maintaining, diagnosing, and recovering from errors in applications and operating systems deployed in production environments. Health models capture system events and instrumentation for your software.
Providing the right view of an application, what it looks like when it is and isn’t functioning normally, and providing the right knowledge to help you troubleshoot system and application issues.
As you can probably see, Health models and Management pack go hand-in-hand to allow you to meet your service level agreements (SLAs) to your own customers, whether they are internal or external to your business.
Lastly, let me conclude with what we are doing to ensure the adoption of this model based approach across Microsoft infrastructure server products (also know as the shameless "plug"):
Common Engineering Criteria Infrastructure Management
Let me point out what we done so far using the Common Criteria:
2005 Criteria
MOM 2005 Management Pack Support at Launch
To help businesses reduce the cost of managing infrastructure, all server products will have a MOM Management Pack available at launch. The management pack will be serviced on the same schedule as the core product. MOM packs will provide:
- Event and performance processing alerts.
- Basic views that graphically map performance and event trending information.
- State Monitoring view (green/yellow/red) state for managed entities.
- Tasks.
Recently, we've updated the Management requirement to include v3 Management Pack capabilities and added the new Health Model capabilities to the requirement.
2008 Criteria
New Health Model to improve Troubleshooting
IT often have to perform an "information treasure hunt" when presented with events and trying to troubleshoot them. The documentation of events is often inconsistent between product documentation, the Windows Event Viewer, and documents on the web.
To solve this problem, all server products must create and maintain a health model based on the standard Service Modeling Language (SML) including relevant operational events and performance counters, in addition to identifying potential failures and define diagnose and recovery information.
Improved Management Pack(s)
The new version of the Management Pack specification released as part of System Center Operations Manager 2007 offers significant improvement in system monitoring, availability, and health through centralized and proactive management. In order to ensure that IT can continue to support existing products in addition to implementing new products by taking advantage of the new Health Model and Management Packs, all server products will continue to also ship Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Management Packs.
If you would like to know more about Health Models and Management packs, here's a couple of relevant links:
Common Engineering Criteria Homepage
Microsoft Dynamic Systems Homepage
Microsoft System Center Homepage
How To Develop A Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007
Virtualization will drive the adoption of 64-bit computing.
Back when we first started with the program we refer to as the Common Engineering Criteria (CEC), we pushed support for Virtualization and 64-bit processors across our products. Now it looks as if we're going to get help making them mainstream from customer demand, no less.
In case you don't know what Virtualization is or what 64-bit means, let me provide a short primer.
Effectively, Virtualization (Virtual Server and Longhorn Server's Windows Virtualization) creates a sandbox, where the application(s) running believe that there's nothing else running beside them and an OS. Access to hardware is provided through the Virtualization layer and it can support many different OS's. In many ways you can argue that we are simply taking the vitalization of resources in Windows one stop further.
64-bit is simply the next generation of processors. Both Intel and AMD have been pushing 64-bit for a while, albeit using different designs initially. There are many benefits of 64-bit computing, and it is not the purpose of this blog to go into them all, but let me summarize:
- Hardware support for Virtualization
- Support for a vast memory space
- Better hardware protection from rogue programs
As I alluded to previously, we pushed the adoption of these two technologies since the initial set of the CEC, published in 2004. If you don't know what the CEC is you should read one of my previous blogs (Common Engineering Criteria - Consistency and Predictability).
It was obvious to us that adoption of 64-bit in general and Virtualization in particular was not a matter of if, but when. We were surprise how fast hardware caught up with regards to servers. Today it is virtually impossible to purchase new server hardware that is not x64-based.
In our CEC for 2008 we are dialing up the support for 64-bit (x64 specifically) system in the server space. We seen over the last year of so that customers have started starts to move from experimenting with vitalization to actually deploying in their data centers, although not in vast numbers initially.
We are assuming that Virtualization and 64-bit (in particular x64) will be mainstream by 2009. And I'm suggesting that the former will push the latter.
Huh?
Let me expand on that. With Windows Virtualization for Longhorn server (codename Viridian) we are introducing a new generation of Virtualization for Windows Server, among other things we taking advantage of the hardware support for Virtualization that AMD and Intel are providing with the their new generation of x64-bit processors (codename VT and Pacifica, respectively). This basically means that the Virtualization software no longer will have to do the heavy lifting of pretending that the OS inside it is running directly on hardware. Remember that Intel's x86 processors provide several levels of protection : Ring 0 through 3. x86 based OS, such as Windows run typically run in ring 0, with applications and most services running in Ring 1 -3. Both processors will provide new Virtualization extensions to allow an the Virtualization to run at a higher level than 0 (with better protection and higher priority that both ring 2 and ring 0), whilst providing the capability of allowing OS's to run in guest partitions on top of it in as though they were running in Ring 0. If this makes your brain hurt, think of it as if the hypervizor runs in ring -1.
In Windows Server "Longhorn" this means that we can provide a very thin OS (referred to as the Hypervizor), on top of which the actually OS's run. This very thin OS will provide a Master OS that controls the other OS's. Effectively, this will give us better performance as well as better control.
Without going to deep into what Virtualization is going bring us and what inevitable challenges we come across, I believe that our customers would want to use the new Virtualization capabilities we are provide together with Windows Server Longhorn.
However, there's a catch, the new hardware capabilities that I've just described above are only provided on Intel's and AMD's 64 bit processor. This means that in order for our customers to take advantage of these new capabilities, they'll have to move the 64-bit. It's my personal opinion that there's sufficient value in doing so, including the new Virtualization capabilities. Also, bear in mind that even though the hypervizor will run on 64-bit systems, it will support both 64- and 32-bit guests OS's.
Now, even in the longer term, it's unlikely that all applications will run in a virtualized environment, but a significant percentage will. Most likely, there will continue to be a number of applications that have special roles (anti-virus, etc) or requires access to specialized hardware devices, thus preventing these from taking advantage of the Virtualization technologies.
In conclusion, today we mandate that, unless there are specific hardware reasons, all infrastructure server products be capable of running in a virtualized environment (for more details, check the CEC homepage). We also mandate that all infrastructure server products support 64-bit. It's our goal that we will have completed the transition to 64-bit support (x64) of of our infrastructure server software by the end of 2009.
Clearly, there's a bright future for 64-bit systems and Virtualization, now we just need to manage those, but that is a topic for later.
If you wish to give me feedback as to what additional criteria (common features or technologies) we should consider in the years ahead feel free to post comments to this blog.
For more information go to the following site:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/cer/overview.mspx
Did you already hear about Windows Home Server? Well, maybe not. Let me give you a brief explanation as to what Windows Home Server is and why you want so it!
Windows Home Server (WHS) is a new member of the expanding Windows Server family. It's a product specifically targeting home users with broadband access to the Internet and more than 2 PC's that are networked. WHS is based on Windows Server and is designed to be very, very easy to administer. So much so that using words like administer, manage, and server would give you and home PC users in general the wrong impression. In fact, you should check out the Hewlett-Packerd WHS, it doesn't have a VGA or a keyboard connector, it is clearly design as a No-touch server. And it's SMALL, about the width of a 2.5" harddrive and twice the height of a soda can, even though it will hold up to 4TB (4 drives).
But I'm getting ahead of myself, let me explain why you want it by explaining to you how I am using the beta version of WHS in my house.
My family consists of 4 people (my wife, our 18-year old son, our 3-year old son, and me). Today we have 3 PC's: our oldest son has one, we have a MediaCenter PC in the living room, and my wife and I share one (that is placed in our home office).
A year or so ago, I set up a server using an old PC, bought a serial ATA RAID controller card and 4 250GB hard drives, and installed Windows Server on it. The main purpose was to buy me peace of mind. Backing up the 80GB of digital pictures and documents on our PC's was driving me mad, and worrying that the CD based solution I was using wasn't effective enough!
I set the server up with a boot drive and setup the 4 SATA drives in a RAID 5 configuration to maximize the speed of accessing the data on the server as well as ensuring that I wouldn't loose data.
As the server worked well as a backup solution, and as I had plenty of storage left on the server, I started to make the server the central storage device for everything. It continued to be the backup for all our documents, but it also became our movie server.
At a certain point late last summer, I decided that I needed to upgrade the server as it was starting to show it's age. At that point I started to hear that we were going to build a server product for home use (yeah, initially I thought it was a preposterous idea, too). But as the concept was explained a demonstrated to me, I warmed up the the idea that this would indeed solve some of my problems, without adding new ones.
the two thing that really sold me on the idea was the centralized backup and the expandability of the storage solution in WHS.
The fact that I could install the backup client of each of our PC's, set it up to backup certain things, and know that I would have access to every version of every document and picture on our PC's from a central location, without me doing ANYTHNG, is the one thing that I really, really appreciate about WHS. Plus the fact that the software allows me to do restore of individual files or full system restore. The backup of all the PC's happens at night, every night.
The other feature I liked is the implementation of the storage in WHS. It is based on how IBM's midrange mainframes (AS400) did storage a long time ago.The concept is very simple: You add as many physical drives to the server (SATA, eSATA, USB, FireWire, etc) and you can then add those to the storage pool as either data or server backup. To the users the server now had one, very big drive.
The only place you can see the actual drives is in the administration console. You can ask WHS to "protect" an individual directory/folder by marking it in the console, this will cause WHS to duplicate the content of that folder to a different physical drive. A very simple, and very intuitive solution compared to the RAID5 system that I had previously. Now I can ask the server to protect only the data that needs protecting.
Another couple of feature that I enjoy (although not as much as the as the two first) are:
Remote administration over the Internet and media sharing through Windows Media Connect.
Remote administration allows me to access the server from anyplace on the planet Earth over the Internet in a secure manner. Sometimes when I'm traveling, I wantto check the status of the backup or something else (I know: Geek), and being able to access the server and all our PC's securely over the Internet through it's webpage (and Remote Desktop) is a tremendous asset if something goes haywire when I traveling.
Media sharing is simply enabled by vitue of WHS supporting Windows Media Connect. Once you've enable the service, you can access the content (music, pictures, and video) from any device (or PC) that supports Windows Media Connect. This includes Roku's and D-Link's neat devices as well as Hewlett-Packard's new LCD TV's.
Today, the server is primarily for backup and document share, as well as our movie server. When I'm done with my install it will become the central hub for media, including all our pictures, videos, music, and recorded TV from our MediaCenter. I am considering adding either Windows Extenders, Roku's SoundBridge devices or PC's in other rooms in the house.
As my plans solidifies I'll keep you posted.
I løbet at de seneste snart 4 år har Microsoft's server produkter gennemgået en forandring. Ofte har vi talt om "Better Together" og integreret innovation, i 2003 besluttede en gruppe af højt placerede Microsoft ledere, at nu skulle der gøres noget mere struktureret ved det.
De besluttede sig at etablere et program - eller rettere en proces ved navn "Common Engineering Criteria". Hele pointen var, at alle server produkt grupperne skulle være enige om at sikre, at deres respektive produkter ville understøtte en række egenskaber eller teknologier i ganske bestemte versioner af deres produkter.
Ideen var - ganske simpel - at både vores kunder og partnere kan forvente et niveau af konsistens på tværs af alle Microsoft's server produkter indenfor et bestemt model år og at vi ville være meget åbne om, hvad disse teknologier vil være og hvornår vi ville introducere dem i vores server produkter.
Vi har oven i købet introduceret en karakterbog på vores hjemmeside, der opremser hvilke produkter der overholder hvilke kriterier samt i hvilke versioner disse understoettes.
Det lyder forjættende simpelt, men det var vigtigt at vi kunne etablere en proces, der ville virke på tværs af over 20 vidt forskellige server produkter med vidt forskellige markeder, meget forskellige niveauer af modenhed, og forskellige grader af kompleksitet.
Oven i hatten kommer så den ekstra kompleksitet, at computer programmer ikke bliver udviklet i løbet at et par uger, men i løbet af mange måneder eller år. Denne proces krævede at de respektive produktgrupper i Microsoft kunne blive enige om hvad der skulle gøres på tværs af alle server produkter op til 2 år i forvejen.
Det første sæt Common Engineering Criteria blev annonceret i sommeren 2004 på TechEd i USA. Denne repræsenterede en række fælles teknologier og egenskaber på tværs af server produkter med modelåret 2005. Dette lyder måske en smule underligt, men husk at Microsoft navngiver vores enterprise produkter efter modelåret (mere præcist Microsoft regnskabsåret) hvori de bliver frigivet. Således gælder 2005 kriterierne for følgende produkter: SQL Server 2005, Live Communications Server 2005, Virtual Server 2005, og Microsoft Operations Manager 2005. Listen er måske ikke imponerende, men det er dog en start.
I årene der er gået siden sommeren 2004 har vi tilføjet både flere server produkter til listen og flere kriterier.
Det er vigtigt at forklare et par regler omkring processen og hvorledes denne bliver håndteret. Generelt skal alle server produkter, der frigives i et givent modelår, overholde de kriterier der er udstukket for det pågældende år. Når det så er sagt, så kan der være gode grunde (både tekniske og forretningsmæssige) hvorfor et givent produkt ikke kan overholde et givent kriterie
For at håndtere denne situation etablerede vi også en proces som kan tillade en undtagelse for et givent kriterie, under forudsætning af, at vore chefer finder at der er gode - forretningsmæssige og/eller tekniske grunde - hvorfor denne undtagelse skal tillades et bestemt server produkt.
For eksempel, kræver 2005 kriterierne, at alle server produkter kan afvikles i Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, både som test miljøer og i produktion. Som du måske kan gætte, kan Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 IKKE afvikles i Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. Hardwaren i dag tillader det ganske simpelthen ikke (og lad os ikke glemme det faktum at det ville grænse til det studentikose at forsøge at afvikle Microsoft Virtual Server i Microsoft Virtual Server).
Microsoft Virtual Server er derfor undtaget dette kriterie, og du kan finde en mere udførlig forklaring på vores hjemmeside (se nedenfor).
Ligeledes har vi strikse retningslinier omkring hvornår vi offentliggør hvilke server produkter understøtter hvilke kriterier og hvilke undtagelser der er blevet godkendt. Som du kan se på vores hjemmeside, begynder vi at offentliggøre status på de individuelle server produkter, når de enkelte produktgrupper frigiver deres første åbne beta.
Kernen i denne proces er, at vi ønsker at være så transparente overfor vore kunder som overhovedet muligt, med hensyn til hvad vi agter, at gøre med vores server produkter. Indtil sidste år (2006) offentliggjorde vi nye kriterie et år før vi begyndte at frigive server produkter, der understøttede disse. I efteråret (2006) besluttede vi, at ændre denne beslutning og starte med at offentliggøre nye kriterier 2 år i forvejen.
Vi er kommet langt i vores bestræbelser på at strømline vore server produkter og tilsikre den ensartethed som vore partnere og kunder (med rette) forventer. Men det betyder ikke at vi er færdige. Som du kan se på vores hjemmeside har vi nu 10 server produkter (ca. 50% af vores mål), der overholder vores kriterier, og listen over ensartet implementerede, standardiserede teknologier stiger stødt år for år. Et tegn på succes er det faktum, at på trods af at vi tilføjer nye server produkter til listen, stiger det forholdsmæssige antal af undtagelser ikke tilsvarende, dette i sig selv indikerer for mig, at det initielle mål og koncept holder og at processen virker.
Hvis du har ideer til hvilke kriterier vi bør tilføje listen, hvad enten det drejer sig om features eller teknologier, så lad mig det vide ved, at poste kommentarer på denne blog.
For more information omkring Common Engineering Criteria kan du gaa til nedenstaeende hjemmeside:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/cer/overview.mspx
Over the past nearly 4 year Microsoft's Servers have been going through a transformation. Many are the times that we have talked about better together, integrated innovation, etc. In 2003, some of our executives decided that now was the time to do something about it.
They decided to start a process - or a program called "Common Engineering Criteria". The whole point was that all server teams would agree on doing certain things across all their products in certain releases.
The simple idea being that our customers and partners could expect a certain level of consistency across all Microsoft Server products within a release year and that we would be very public about what we were going to do and when. Even to the point that we would maintain a public scorecard that listed the status of the individual server products vis-a-vis the common engineering criteria.
It sound really simple, but this needed to work across 20+ products with different target markets, different levels of maturity in the market, different degrees of complexity.
Adding to the complexity was also the fact that computer software aren't developed in weeks, but years. The effort required the various groups within Microsoft to agree on what should be done in all server applications and how up to 2 years in advance.
The first list of Common Engineering Criteria was published in the summer of 2004 at TechEd in the US. This represented the common technologies and features of the 2005 products. this may sound strange but as you may know, Microsoft names the enterprise server products after the year (actually the Microsoft Fiscal Year) in which they ship. Consequently, the list of Common Engineering Criteria announced applies to SQL Server 2005, Live Communications Server 2005, Virtual Server 2005, and Microsoft Operations Manager 2005. Maybe not an impressive list, but a start nonetheless.
In the years since the summer of 2004 we have been adding more server products and more criteria.
It's important to explain a couple of ground rules. As a general rule all server product shipping in a given model year will comply with the criteria for that year in addition to the criteria from the previous years. However, some times there are reasons why a particular product cannot comply with a certain criteria.
We have a process for handling those exceptions and can grant a given product group an exemption for the complying with the criteria if our executives decided that there are good (business and/or technical) reasons why aparticular server product can't comply with a particular criteria. For example, the criteria from 2005 requires that all server products be tested to run inside Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, both in test and in product. Well, as you may have guessed Microsoft Virtual Server cannot run inside Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. The hardware simply will not support it (besides the fact that it would be completely and utterly ridiculous to run Virtual Server inside Virtual Server). Needless to say, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 was granted an exemption and you can find both exemption as well as the explanation why on the Common Engineering Criteria Website listed below.
We have strict requirements as to when we start disclosing what server product will comply with the criteria and what exemptions may have been granted. As you can see on the website, we begin tracking the individual server products when they ship their first public beta.
Also, core to this process is our wish to be as transparent to our customers as we possibly can as to what we are going to do with our server products, so we up until last year (2006) we published the additional criteria and the new products that would be measured against them every summer at TechEd. Last fall we decided to change that such that we would announce them a full 2 years in advance. So at IT Forum on Barcelona we announced the 2008 criteria following our announcement of the 2007 criteria at TechEd in the summer.
We come a long way, but there plenty work for us ahead. As you can see from the website we now track 10 of our server products (about 50% of the target server products) and the list of criteria is growing year over year. Not only are we adding server products and criteria to the list, we are not growing the number of exemptions at the same pace, which clearly indicates that the initial concept behind the Common Engineering Criteria is working.
If you wish to give me feedback as to what additional criteria (common features or technologies) we should consider in the years ahead feel free to post comments to this blog.
For more information go to the following site:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/cer/overview.mspx
