Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta Available too!
With all the news about the release of the first public look at Windows 7 something might have slipped past you and that was the release of Windows Server 2008 R2. As you might imagine there are quite a few upgrades and improvements and there is a great four page document that covers the Top 10 IT Pro Tasks Made Easier with Server 2008 R2 as well as a PowerPoint that gives a Windows Server 2008 R2 Overview and finally a Windows Server 2008 R2 Reviewers Guide that covers off everything new and different.
Probably the biggest changes, or at least the most important ones in my mind being a virtualization guy, are those related to Hyper-V 2.0. I get asked every week about QuickMigration vs. VMotion and the associated downtime with with a Quick Migration vs. a VMotion migration. Well Hyper-V 2.0 now supports Live Migration which provides seemless migration of VMs between hosts in a cluster with no loss of connectivity, no downtime! Finally I can answer that question, now all I need is the hardware to demo it!
There is also some great new features for the mobile worker and those in the branch office. With Windows Server 2008 R2 we will be introducing Branch Side Caching, BranchCache reduces the bandwidth consumed by users for intranet based HTTP and SMB traffic and improves end user experience by serving frequently accessed content from within the branch office network. BranchCache is a part of the Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 Client and works with security technology such as SSL and IPSEC.
DirectAccess is a new feature in Windows® 7 and Windows Server® 2008 R2 that gives users the experience of being seamlessly connected to their corporate network any time they have Internet access. Think RPC over HTTPS for Outlook for all corporate applications. This is truly moving towards the fully connected mobile user, securely working from anywhere with an internet connection.
Oh I almost forgot, for those of you using Microsoft Hyper-V Server, there is an R2 version of that as well that adds the same support and new features as above but also adds Windows Server Failover Clustering to the mix allowing you to add high availability and Live Migration capabilities to your free Hyper-V Server deployments!
You can grad the Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta here and be sure to also check out the Virtualization Team Blog for more.
Credit to my friend Rodney Buike, IT Pro Advisor in Canada for some of the info in this post.
