Dwayne's Blog : Windows Server 2008

Launch day !!! Windows 7 & Server 2008 R2 released

dwaynef — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:40:00 GMT

Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 both went to public release today (GA), both operating systems have been available via Volume License, MSDN & Technet previously. You will start to see some very cool hardware coming your way from the various OEMs, including laptops with multipoint touch and of course as I've mentioned on my blog before, Netbooks with Windows 7.

Try and attend an event (perhaps you saw me at AMC 25 launch in NYC) or attend one virtually.

Check the www.Windows.com (includes some discounts and options for your upgrades) and www.Windows.com/social (for all your twitter/facebook/rss/social 7 needs)

Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 & Hyper-V R2 RTM'ed !!!

dwaynef — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:12:00 GMT

So big news today, 3 major products went RTM all at the same time, there will be lots of news and more authorative blogs out there, so I'll just throw in a few pointers.

Windows 7, the next desktop OS (replaces Vista), if you haven't downloaded the beta or RC yet, I strongly encourage you to pull down one of the trial copies when they become available. Very fast, very responsive, actually runs on less resources/hardware than it's predecessor. I'm presently running my Samsung S10 Netbook (1.6 Atom Proc, comes with 1Gb Ram) with Windows 7 and Office 2010 Technical Preview (another blog post) and it's great.

Windows Server 2008 R2 (note this is what people thought would be called Win 7 Server, it's not, it's called R2). Big change here is the great new functionality in Hyper-V (Live Migration, Clustered Shared Volumes) as well as support for some great better together functionality with Win 7 (Direct Access, Branch Cache, Bitlocker to go)

Hyper-V R2, Free Hypervisor with High Availability and Live Migration capability!!!

Really good blog from the Virtualization Team detailing all the Hypervisor improvements as well as regularly updating and answering questions/statements about Microsoft Virtualization, good read here

Windows Server Team announcement here

Windows 7 Team announcement here

RSAT for Windows 7 RC available

dwaynef — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:50:00 GMT

Microsoft made the Remote Server Administration Tools available for Windows 7 RC.

RSAT Client is the collection of Windows Server management tools which enable IT professionals to manage their Windows Server infrastructure from their PCs running Windows 7 and includes the following Server Manager, Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) Tools, Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) Tools, Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS) Tools, DHCP Server Tools, DNS Server Tools, File Services Tools, Hyper-V Tools, Terminal Services Tools, BitLocker Password Recovery Viewer, Failover Clustering Tools, Group Policy Management Tools, Network Load Balancing Tools, SMTP Server Tools, Storage Explorer Tools, Storage Manager for SANs Tools, Windows System Resource Manager Tools.

The main download page is here http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=f6c62797-791c-48e3-b754-c7c0a09f32f3&displaylang=en

· Microsoft Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7 RC (x86): http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/F/C/1FC27A82-15D9-4D93-B3BC-24204175F9DF/Windows6.1-KB958830-x86.msu

· Microsoft Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7 RC (x64): http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/F/C/1FC27A82-15D9-4D93-B3BC-24204175F9DF/Windows6.1-KB958830-x64.msu

Release Candidates everywhere!

dwaynef — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:18:00 GMT

So the last week has had a lot of news about the public availability of release candidates for Hyper-V R2 Server, Windows 2008 R2 Server and the Windows 7 Client operating systems. They were initially available for Technet and MSDN subscribers, but now are public, see links below.

Hyper-V Server R2 RC

Windows Server 2008 R2 RC

Windows 7 RC

Hyper-V Server is a standalone free product, details here .The highlight features for the R2 release will be the inclusion of High Availability and Live Migration features (while still remaining a free product).

Windows Server 2008 Foundation Launch

dwaynef — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 19:42:00 GMT

Microsoft Launched Windows Server 2008 Foundation Edition yesterday, it is aimed at the very small end of the server business market. Typically for the customers who today use workgroups or a file & print server that's actually running a client OS.

So some of the key points

- Aimed for the sub 15 clients market (comes OEM with 15 CALs, so next extra CAL purchase generally needed)

- Can upgrade to regular Standard Windows Server

- Limited to 1 socket, 8 GB RAM (Typically low end OEM Servers that presently are selling at workstation prices)

- Customer who are looking for all in one solutions (e.g. mail as well) would still look at at Small Business Server.

Some additional info

Windows Server Blog here

Windows Foundation Home site

Two non profits that will benefit from sales of Foundation Server are Techsoup and Telecentre

Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta

dwaynef — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 17:13:00 GMT

So the Server side of Windows 7 (there will be no Windows 7 Server, it's called 2008 R2, see my blog below on Windows 7 clarity) has been released in beta to public, link to the public stuff below (MSDN also has downloads)

Client side (Windows 7) here as well

Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 will be the next version of the Windows Server operating system from Microsoft. Building on the features and capabilities of the current Windows Server 2008 release version, Windows Server 2008 R2 allows you to create organization solutions that are easier to plan, deploy, and manage than previous versions of Windows Server.

Developing upon the increased security, reliability, and performance provided by Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 extends connectivity and control to local and remote resources. This means your organizations can benefit from reduced costs and increased efficiencies gained through enhanced management and control over resources across the enterprise.

Evaluate Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta (available in English, German, and Japanese) by downloadable ISO format. Editions for evaluation include Datacenter, Enterprise, Standard, Itanium Based Systems, and Web. VHD and other download formats will be available shortly

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/R2-Beta.aspx

20-Part Webcast Series on Microsoft Virtualization Solutions

dwaynef — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 16:40:00 GMT

Yung Chou has put up a great blog with a link to 20 Technet Webcasts starting on January 14th around Microsoft Virtualization.

His blog here Also some great free Elearning content here

SP2 Beta for Vista & Server 2008

dwaynef — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 17:05:00 GMT

So one of the good parts of the shared code base between Vista & Server 2008 is the move to a single service pack for both client & server (hmmm ... used to do that a while back in the NT days). Early betas are now available to certain customers.

Technet take on it ->

Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 (SP2) and Windows Vista Service Pack 2 (SP2) Customer Preview Program (CPP)

December 2, 2008

Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 and Windows Vista Service Pack 2 Beta is an update to Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. It provides customer and partner feedback driven fixes into a single service pack, minimizing deployment and testing complexity. In addition to all previously released updates, SP2 will contain changes focused on addressing reliability and performance issues, supporting new types of hardware, and adding support for several emerging standards.

More here

Windows 7 clarity

dwaynef — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 02:33:00 GMT

So a lot of news released this week around Windows 7 at the PDC conference with a lot of the media getting their first look at the product and getting pre beta copies with detailed reviewer guides detailing the significant changes in the OS.But like a lot of things, sometimes more information leads to more questions and I've heard quite a few confused ones this week, so one thing I'd like to clarify is the naming.

Currently Microsoft has Windows Vista as the current desktop OS and Windows Server 2008 as the current Server OS. Microsoft has gone back towards a shared code model and the two OSes will be developed in close sync, and the code name for both replacements was Windows 7, sounds simple?

The confusion is the final naming has come out and the client OS (replacement for Vista) will retain the Windows 7 name, however the Server OS (presently Windows Server 2008) will be called Windows Server 2008 R2. There will be no Windows Server 7.

So hopefully you are still with me and looking forward to some of the very cool features in both the client and server side, improvements to Hyper-V, Powershell, TS, Powershell, Server Core, the UI on client, performance and resource tunning, take a look at some of the details on Arstechnica, Engadget and the reviewers guide for Server R2 from Microsoft.com

More Hyper-V stuff

dwaynef — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 22:22:00 GMT

More updates around Microsoft's Hypervisor based virtualization offerings, bit of a duplicate post (to the CI team blog), and I have previously mentioned the Hyper-V updates earlier, just adding in the new Hyper-V Server info ...

Hyper-V Server has been released, it is a seperate product from the Hyper-V included in Windows Server 2008. It is available for download now (for free), link here. Table below illustrates the differences

Virtualization Needs	Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008	Windows Server 2008 Standard	Windows Server 2008 Enterprise	Windows Server 2008 Datacenter
Server Consolidation
Test and Development
Mixed OS Virtualization (Linux and Windows)
Local Graphical User Interface
High Availability—Clustering
Quick Migration
Large Memory Support (Host OS) > 32 GB RAM
Support for > 4 Processors (Host OS)
Ability to Add Additional Server Roles
Virtualization Rights per Server License	Each VM Guest requires a server license	1 Physical + 1 VM	1 Physical + 4 VMs	1 Physical + Unlimited VMs

So, if you don't want to scroll down to the early piece, info here -> There has also been an update to the Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 to allow for 192 supported guest VMs on a single host as well as support for upcoming 6 core CPUs among other things. KB Article and download package

Free Online Microsoft Courses

dwaynef — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:39:00 GMT

Microsoft's learning normally has a couple of free courses, especially with some of the newer products. List available right now includes a lot of stuff on Virtualization (Hyper-V, App-V, SCVMM), SQL, Windows 2008

Training for free, how can you go wrong?

List of free courses here note you can subscribe to RSS for more course release information

Hyper-V update

dwaynef — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 01:53:00 GMT

A new (good type) of update is available for Microsoft's Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008.

Update includes support for more logical processors and larger number of VM's per physical host.

KB Article here

Hyper-V RTM Release !!!

dwaynef — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:29:00 GMT

Guess it will be on a lot of blogs today, but here goes anyway.

Hyper-V, Microsoft's hypervisor based virtualization product that is part of Windows Server 2008 went RTM today. In terms of public availability, it sould be available for download later today (12pm PST), with availability via Windows Update scheduled for July 8th.

Hyper-V Home Page here

Server & Tools blog

Virtualization Team blog

Understanding Hyper-V networking

dwaynef — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:34:00 GMT

Those of us who came from the Virtual PC/Server world will have quickly realized that setting up your NICs and the host's setup is a bit different under Hyper-V, nice quick explaination of hyper-v netowrking (with pictures!) from the Virtual PC Guy's blog

Windows Server 2008 Performance Tuning Guidelines updated to include Hyper-V

dwaynef — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:09:00 GMT

This guide describes important tuning parameters and settings that can result in improved performance for the Windows Server 2008 operating system. Each setting and its potential effect are described to help you make an informed judgment about its relevance to your system, workload, and performance goals.

This information applies for the Windows Server 2008 operating system. Download

What's New:

•	Added "Power Guidelines" under Server Hardware section and added "Performance Tuning for Virtualization Servers" section.

Included in this paper:

Performance Tuning for Server Hardware, Networking Subsystem, Storage Subsystem, Web Servers, File Servers, Active Directory Servers, Terminal Server, SAP Sales and Distribution Two-Tier Workload & more

Two other good places for Performance -> Windows Server Performace Team blog & Tony Voellm's Performance blog