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...

There are new demonstration videos of the upcoming Small Business Server 2008 and Essential Business Server 2008 on TechNet Edge. Program manager Bjorn Levidow provides an overview of EBS management , including remote administration, add-in management Read More...

Good news. Today we opened up the Public Preview for Windows Essential Server Solutions - Small Business Server 2008 and Essential Business Server 2008 . Visit here to find out how to download and evaluate the Release Candidate 0 versions of both. EBS 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...

Greetings from Dallas at the SMB Summit , where 400+ channel partners are gearing up for Windows Essential Server Solutions . Small Business Server 2008 is the topic du jour, tomorrow is all about Essential Business Server 2008 for midsized companies. Read More...

Do you want to use the server core installation option of Windows Server 2008, but put off by the command-line? Well, Guy Teverovsky has what you need. He created a GUI for the GUI-less server core of WS08. Download it here. Patrick 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 we head into the big Heroes launch next week, Microsoft today introduced the Windows Essential Server Solutions family of products. Available later this year, Essential Server Solutions – Windows Small Business Server 2008 and Windows Essential Business Read More...

Mid-market IT professionals interested in learning more about the upcoming Essential Business Server solution should tune into this show on BlogTalkRadio . Microsoft's Steve VanRoekel and Arlin Sorensen of Heartland Technology Solutions talk about the Read More...

We all know that what we do is way cooler than having a real job! Do you think those guys in accounting have their own Comic Series? – HECK NO! The HHH Comic series launches today: Signup for the RSS feed and hang on for the ride! 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...

Hello folks, My name is Justin Graham. My sole lot in life is to make sure IT Professionals have what they need to get a head start on Windows Server 2008. I have no other purpose really, my team is not in the Super Bowl, I work 5.4*10^12 hours per week, Read More...