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...

The Windows Storage Solutions team that manages DPM 2007 is very excited to announce that the ‘ Rollup Update ’ for System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 is now available for download.   The biggest new workload that DPM now 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...

In the spirit of keeping you updated on Windows Storage Solutions, this week members of our team are off to Orlando, Florida for the bi-annual Storage Networking World (SNW) conference. You may recall that last October at SNW, we announced the RTM of 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...

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...

This week, our Windows Storage Solutions division announced that DPM 2007 has released to manufacturing. In November, DPM 2007 will become generally available and will launch at Microsoft IT Forum in Barcelona, Spain. DPM 2007 sets a new standard in protecting Read More...

Things have been a little quiet around here since we released Windows Server 2008 Beta 3 (over 250,000 downloads so far and counting!), so I wanted to take this chance to let you know about something that you'll soon be able to take advantage of in Windows Read More...

There's been passing mentions of Windows Home Server on this blog. So I wanted to pass along that yesterday Windows Home Server was released to manufacturing ... ahead of schedule. You can watch the final sign-off meeting here. OEM products will hit the store shelves this fall. It's been more than 4 years since Windows Server 2003 was released, and since then it has been the basis for new storage and small business servers, Microsoft's entry into high-performance computing, branch office and 64-bit computing ... and now the home. Go check Home Server. Patrick Read More...

[update: I'm told there were some issues with the webcast this morning so the schedule is being moved back by one day. The first webcast will be tomorrow, June 20, and it has a new event ID and replay URL. The changes are noted below] Geared for OEM and SI audiences, a couple colleagues are hosting live (and archived) webcasts on installation and configuration of Virtual Server 2005 SP1, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, and Virtual Server with Data Protection Manager (for back/recovery). These Webinars are this week; in fact, the first one has already begun. Read More...

In the storage world, performance is a big deal and is often a differentiator….how do you ask? Well, some users will make a decision on Fibre Channel vs. iSCSI based on throughput performance, some users will make a specific purchasing decision on a device Read More...

Well, blogging can be full of excitement. I have found out that my blog posted on May 20th contains a non factual sentence as far as beta 3 is concerned. The following sentence: "SMB2.0 will also support transactions, symbolic links and client side encryption" is not correct. Transaction support and client side encryption will not be available in Windows Server 2008 and therefore are not in the beta 3 release either. I apologize for the confusion. Claude Lorenson Read More...

With the “official” name of the next Windows server release announced last week at WinHEC (Windows Server 2008….shocker!) and with availability of Beta 3, I figured this was a good time to discuss some of the features as they relate to the storage workload. Read More...