Windows Server Division WebLog

Excerpt from the post on the SBS blog by group program manager Dean Paron: On behalf of the SBS team, I am extremely pleased to announce that Windows Small Business Server 2008 software has been finalized! Today both SBS Standard and Premium are being Read More...

Helping businesses address the growing complexity of managing their IT environments, today at Microsoft Management Summit 2008 we announced the public beta release of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (formerly referred to as code name “Virtual Read More...

What a Launch Wave it has been! I've just returned from celebrating Windows Server 2008 with many of you all over the world. It was great to hear your stories and see how Windows Server 2008 will fit into many of your organizations. For those of you who Read More...

I’m really pleased to say that the release candidate of Hyper-V is available for download today. You can read the announcement and Jeff’s more detailed post. This milestone is important to the hundreds of customers and partners in the early adopter programs, and those of you trialing Hyper-V on your own, because it’s feature complete, better performing than the beta, and you’ll have a better experience using it. Reports from the Hyper-V early adopter programs have matched some of the third-party reviews and first looks, with comments such as: · “External deployments have exceeded Beta coverage goals” · “External TAP deployments have increased significantly” Amongst the early adopter customers, the three most common Windows Server 2008 roles run within Hyper-V are IIS, application server and Terminal Services. The four most deployed Microsoft applications are SQL Server 2005 and 2008, Exchange Server and Forefront, while more than half of the customers are running an AV/security application, nearly 50% are running a backup appliance at this point, and around 75% of the customers are running Hyper-V with some attached storage. At the same time we’re starting to see more and more and more ISV partners announce plans to support Hyper-V. So overall we’re seeing good enterprise uptake of Hyper-V. I was in France and the Nordics two weeks ago attending launch events for Windows Server, SQL Server and Visual Studio. Lots of the attendees had already started testing the beta of Hyper-V. Several people remarked that they were impressed with early testing of the multi-site clustering capabilities for remote disaster recovery. Beyond the technical capabilities, total cost of ownership was another hot topic. Given that Hyper-V is a role within Windows Server 2008 – the beta of Hyper-V was included with Windows Server 2008 – customers attending the launch were looking forward to having these server consolidation and DR capabilities built into Windows Server 2008. I did have to remind several folks that Hyper-V will be available with three, x64 editions of Windows Server 2008 (the versions of Windows Server 2008 without Hyper-V are $28 less). And I often noted our work on cross-platform interoperability with Citrix/Xen, Novell and Sun, and that we’re opening up APIs to the community. Read More...

Lots happening in Orlando at Convergence 2008 - the Microsoft Dynamics users' conference. Steve Ballmer and vice president Kirill Tatarinov are speaking and the Dynamics team is making a number of announcements , including a partnership with EDS to extend Read More...

The team behind Windows Essential Business Server 2008 for midsized companies (part of the newly announced Windows Essential Server Solutions family and formerly known as "Centro") has launched a team blog here . Group Program Manager Eric Watson provides Read More...

In the course of talking to many Microsoft partners and customers, the Windows Small Business Server team has learned that there are sometimes misperceptions about the product, in many cases based on experiences with the earlier versions of SBS. In hopes Read More...

As I write this, I’m in the room where it all happens - in building 26, better known as the ship room. Ten minutes ago Windows Server 2008 officially RTM’d. Also in here with me are my colleagues who have been working on Windows Vista SP1, also RTM’ing Read More...

Due to the Martin Luther King holiday in the U.S. on Monday, it was a fairly quiet day on the roads and in the office. But there was a flurry of server virtualization news, news and news out of Redmond. Here are the lightlights: Acquisition of Calista Technologies, whose virtual desktop platform improves the remote desktop experience for running 3D graphics and multimedia capabilities to RDP. For one thing, Calista's technology reduces network bandwidth requirements and can accelerate data rates by as much as 20X. For those of you who are fans of Terminal Services, this acquisition will make TS use much better. Neal Margulis, the founder of Calista, posted here about his views on joining Microsoft. Do you want to run Windows Vista on a server? If so, now you can do so at a lower price point. Check out Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop allows you to run Windows in virtual machines on servers and access them from either PCs or thin clients. The annual subscription to Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop is now roughly $23 per desktop for rich clients covered by Software Assurance for Windows Client. If you want to run thin-clients, you can purchase a subscription for an estimated retail price of $110 per desktop. Citrix is developing software that will easily transfer virtual machines between the Xen hypervisor in Citrix XenServer and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V to ensure greater interoperability. The tool, which is scheduled to be available to beta test in Q2 2008, will transfer all configuration information and driver set of the virtual machines in the Microsoft Virtual Hard Disk image format to run with Hyper-V. From the news release, “XenDesktop, planned for release in second quarter 2008, will support and extend Windows Server 2008 shortly after the availability of Hyper-V” Citrix will extend support for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center in all its virtualization products: XenDesktop, Presentation Server and XenServer. a future version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager will support managing Citrix XenServer, and Citrix plans to integrate Hyper-V with Citrix XenServer. And Microsoft has expanded technical support to running MS Office applications via SoftGrid 4.2 or MS Application Virtualization 4.5. Microsoft application virtualization allows customers to pre-configure applications for offline use on a client PC; so end users can be fully productive on their machine, even when they are offline. Four new Solutions Accelerators will help you assess, plan, deploy and secure MS virtualization products [Hyper-V, SoftGrid, Terminal Services]. They’re available in beta form now, and will be GA at the end of February. All of this news, as well as an email from Bob Muglia and today’s webcast, can be accessed here. Patrick Read More...

Hyper-V is a cluster-aware feature within Windows Server 2008, offering native support for VM high availability. And now that beta 1 is available, you can check it out yourself. So what are the 10 steps you have to go through to build a host cluster using iSCSI shared storage? Read Robert Larson's post. Screen captures included ;-) Patrick Read More...

Every now and again we'll use this blog to correct errors in the public domain, mainly by journalists or analyst trying to do a good job but who come up short on fact checking due to time constraints (yes I'm being nice). Of course some of these errors are more obvious than others. The latest form of error pertains to Hyper-V. Somehow both Greg in Australia and Mario in New York believe that Hyper-V is built on Xen [cough]. Hyper-V, the new beta feature in Windows Server 2008 RC1, running on top of Xen [cough-cough]. Maybe they're confused over our July 2006 interop announcement with XenSource? Or maybe they take too serious the work MS Research did during the development of Xen 1.x by developing a port of Windows XP to Xen? Or maybe they're working with Oliver Stone, who is exposing another cover-up? Can you imagine GPL code running in the Windows kernal ... now that'd be something. Mario and Greg - a picture is worth a thousand words. I hope the following two diagrams help you. Read More...

With a tip of the cap to Francis Church’s famous 1897 editorial, I’m very proud that the team has come through just like St. Nick. Today we announced the public availability of a beta of Hyper-V, the hypervisor-based virtualization feature in Windows Server 2008. You can download it today with Windows Server 2008 Enterprise (x64) edition and let us know what you think of it. Before I get into some of the new features in Hyper-V beta, I first want to talk about what I see coming in 2008. I always want to make sure customers and partners know what’s important with our virtualization plans. And hopefully what you’ll read that it’s not too different than what I wrote in February. Read More...

Dan Harman, one of the program managers in the Server Manager team will be hosting a webcast next tuesday on Server MAnager (focusing on the changes introduced in the RC1 release) as well was Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT), which had its Beta Read More...

Before heading off for a few days of turkey, college football and family, a post from Mauricio Freitas caught my eye this evening. Mauricio is an admin for Geekzone, which he describes as such: Geekzone publishes news, reviews and articles on technology topics. We also have some busy forums. Geekzone is now one of the top 15 New Zealand websites in number of unique browsers Geekzone is now live on WS08 RC0 and IIS7. Very cool. I'll be interested to read Mauricio's future posts of the deployment. Heroes happen in New Zealand. Patrick Read More...

back to Redmond late yesterday from Reno where I was attending Supercomputing 2007 conference. I suspect SC07 will be best remembered for the power outage that hit the convention center and most of downtown Reno, and Ashlee's stellar headline. While I was in Reno, there were lots of colleagues in Barcelona making all kinds of announcements, from Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V to System Center, at Microsoft's IT Forum. I'm told there were 50+ journalists at a panel session on virtualization, and from the looks of all the news this week, IT reporters either attended Oracle Openworld or IT Forum (except the aforementioned Ashlee Vance). One Microsoft news item that went overlooked, despite the news of Oracle VM hypervisor, Sun xVM hypervisor, VMware Server 2.0 beta and Hyper-V (did I miss one?), was the Server Virtualization Validation Program. You can read a bit about it in this news release, read comments non-MS people here and Alessandro's post. So what is this program? Customers who have valid Windows Server licenses or support agreements can call for support to either Microsoft or the vendor that has provided them the validated server virtualization solution. Whichever company is contacted first will try to resolve the customer's issue, and in the absence of a solution will, via TSAnet, pass on the information to the other company to help solve the problem. For those of you who know WHQL [Windows Hardware Quality Lab], think of it as WHQL but for server virtualization software. The program will be open to any vendor who creates/sells/services server virtualization software can test and validate that Windows Server 2008/2003/2000 runs as expected as a guest OS. Along with this validation comes mutual technical support for the Windows Server OS running in the non-Microsoft VM. Given this week's news by Sun and Oracle, this program just became a bit more important to customers. [more] Read More...