Windows Server Division WebLog

Yesterday the marketing team published a case study about NuStar Energy, a crude-oil transportation and storage company that has grown rapidly through acquisitions and recently joined the Fortune 500.  NuStar relies on Windows Server, System Center and Forefront solutions to integrate new people and systems in days.  Their IT department can respond to new business needs in hours instead of weeks with consistently configured, secured servers and a set of easy-to-use tools for managing them.

Video below.  The written case study is available here.

Please join us tomorrow, June 23rd from 10:30am – 11:00am (PDT) for a teleconference with Bob Kelly, corporate VP of Infrastructure Server Marketing. Feel free to submit questions for the QA session following the presentation over the phone, or via Twitter any time leading up to or during the teleconference by tweeting with the hashtag,  #qs4ms. If you are interested in attending, please REGISTER NOW.

Are you interested in hearing about how other IT pros are reacting to economic conditions and where they’re investing? Do you have questions about Microsoft’s efforts to help IT be more cost effective and deliver new solutions to business? Is there a connection between virtualization and cloud computing? What is Microsoft doing in enterprise security?

On Tuesday, June 23rd from 10:30am – 11:00am (PDT), join a teleconference with Bob Kelly, corporate VP of Infrastructure Server Marketing. Bob will talk about the state of IT within the context of results from a new Harris Interactive study of 1,200 IT professionals from the U.S., United Kingdom, Japan and Germany. The study was commissioned by Microsoft’s Server & Tools Business. There will be time for your questions following the brief presentation. Submit questions over the phone or you can submit them at any time leading up to or during the teleconference by tweeting with the Twitter hashtag,  #qs4ms. If you are interested in attending, please REGISTER NOW. Once you open the invite box, you can save and close to your calendar.

Hi, Isaac Roybal here.  It’s been over two weeks since the release of Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 (SP2) and we’re seeing great adoption. From a Hyper-V point of view, we’re excited because the final Hyper-V release is an integrated feature in SP2 making it easier and faster to deploy Hyper-V. If you recall, when Windows Server 2008 was released, Hyper-V Beta was included. This meant to get the final Hyper-V release, you needed to go to Windows Update, download and go through the update process.

With Windows Server 2008 SP2, Hyper-V final bits are included so there’s no need to pull down individual downloads which speeds up deployments. There are also some notable updates in SP2, including scalability enhancements for running on systems with up to 24 logical processors which enables support for up to 192 running virtual machines, update for Hyper-V when managed with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and updates for backup/restore of virtual machines with the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).

For those of you who have already deployed Hyper-V, SP2 is a simple upgrade. Here are a couple of top-of-mind things to think about when you’re planning your fresh install or upgrade to SP2:

·         In-place upgrades of Windows Server 2008 to Windows Server 2008 SP2 is supported for both the parent partition and child VMs.

o   If you’re still running the Beta version of Hyper-V (which you shouldn’t J) you need to upgrade to RTM (apply KB950050) before installing SP2

o   If the Hyper-V role was enabled on the parent partition prior to the upgrade to SP2 it will be automatically enabled once the upgrade is completed.

o   Uninstall any prerelease versions of SP2 that might be installed. 

·         If a fresh SP2 install is being done and you’d like to move VMs to it, export the VMs from the originating  Windows Server 2008 host and import them on the SP2 host.

·         Integration Components (ICs) for the child virtual machines must be updated to the SP2 version.

o   If you’re doing a fresh install or an upgrade of SP2 on the parent partition, it does not update the integration components inside the virtual machine. Be sure to update the VM ICs after SP2 is installed.

o   If you have virtual machines created on the Beta version of the Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V role, and you installed the Beta version of the integration components on those machines, you must uninstall the integration components and reinstall the latest SP2 integration components. 

o   If you do an upgrade to SP2 inside the child VM the IC are automatically upgraded.

o   If you are running an older operating system, you need to use vmguest.iso to upgrade the integration services.

The Windows Server User Research team is planning to conduct site visits to learn from people who are involved in any and all aspects of managing servers! We’re hitting the road in July to understand what needs to be improved in our server management software. If your company has at least 500 PCs and has offices in North America, we’d like to consider visiting your company and meeting with 2-4 members of your IT department.

We're offering each participant their choice of a retail Microsoft software or hardware offering from a list of our most popular products. If you are interested or know someone who could be interested in participating, please e-mail us at itvisits@microsoft.com

Check out the new video our friends at TechNet Edge put together that covers new changes in backup with Windows Server 2008 R2.

Download the New IIS SEO Toolkit Beta

Do you ever wonder what it would be like to tirelessly explore the Internet as a search engine crawler? What would you find? Would the sites you meet help you or are you on your own? Would the sites tell you where important information lives or must you scour even further? Would the sites tell you how often they are updated or would you just have to figure it out? What info do you pass on to your human overlords? Were the sites even built with you in mind? The internet can feel like a big daunting place to search engine crawlers, so let’s do our part to help out. Enter the world of Search Engine Optimization.

Today, Microsoft is announcing the IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit Beta – brand new tools that help Web developers, hosting providers, and server administrators improve their sites’ relevance in search results by recommending how to make them more search engine-friendly, which is especially important now, because we all need to play nice with the new kid, Bing. The IIS SEO Toolkit includes three modules that integrate with IIS Manager: Site Analysis, Robots Exclusion, and Sitemaps and Site Indexes.

The Site Analysis module suggests changes that can help improve the volume and quality of traffic to your Web site from search engines. Site Analysis allows users to analyze local and external Web sites with the purpose of optimizing the site's content, structure, and URLs for search engine crawlers.

The Robots Exclusion module makes it easier to control and restrict the content that search engines index and display. Robots Exclusion enables Web site owners to manage the robots.txt file from within the IIS Manager interface. This file is used to control the indexing of specified URLs, by disallowing search engine crawlers from accessing them.

The Sitemaps and Site Indexes module can help inform search engines about locations that are available for indexing. Sitemaps and Site Indexes enables Web site owners to manage the sitemap files and sitemap indexes on the site, application, and folder level to help keep search engines up to date, including the most important URLs listed and ranked in the sitemap.xml file.

So don’t forget about one of your most important customers with no voice (or arms, or legs, just crawly thingies) and help out the search engine crawlers of the World Wide Web. The IIS SEO Toolkit Beta can be installed with the Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta for use with IIS 7.0 and IIS 7.5. Also, be sure to check out other IIS Extensions from Microsoft.

Eric Rezabek

Senior Product Manager

IIS/Web

You may have seen some of the recent news articles that have started to roll out around the RTM and General availability dates of Windows 7.  As Windows Server 2008 R2 is a joint development effort with Windows 7 we are aligned with the same RTM and General Availability (GA) dates.

With that – Windows Server 2008 R2  RTM code is on track to be available to our partners sometime in the 2^nd half of July. Windows Server 2008 R2 will also be broadly available about the same time as the Windows 7 GA date of Oct 22.

Download and start testing with the RC candidate at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver

Ward Ralston

Group Product Manager

Windows Server Marketing

Today we are pleased to announce the Release to Web (RTW) of Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.  SP2, a combined service pack for both operating systems encapsulated in a single installer, will simplify deployment, management, and support for IT Pros.  It includes support for new types of hardware and emerging hardware standards, as well as updates since SP1.  For specific information on what’s included in SP2, visit the notable changes document.

SP2 has been posted for download on our Download Center and Windows Update. Customers can visit either of these locations to download and install SP2. However, for customers that need increased management of SP2, we recommend using Automatic Updates/Group Policy and Windows Software Update Services (WSUS). Similar to previous releases, SP2 delivery over Automatic Update is a “throttled release” which will begin in June. Customers who require additional time to prepare for the download and deployment of SP2 can download the Windows Service Pack Blocker Toolkit to prevent SP2 from installing for up to 12 months. I hope these tools will help streamline your testing and deployment of SP2.

Last but certainly not least, the bits.

Download: Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 SP2 x86 (5 Language Standalone)
Download: Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 SP2 x64 (5 Language Standalone)

Thanks,

Justin Graham
Windows Server Team

It was almost exactly one year ago that we signed off on beta 2 of Windows HPC Server 2008 and today we made available the Community Technical Preview (CTP) of Windows HPC Server 2008 R2. Based on Windows Server 2008 R2, the CTP is a preliminary release, allowing an early preview of planned functionality for HPC Server 2008 R2. 

In our labs, we’re up and running on Windows Server 2008 R2. We’re regularly running stress runs on Dan Reed’s 1000 node cluster in Microsoft Research, teasing out distributed admin issues with virtual machines that turn our own 540 node cluster into a 2000 node süper-cluster, and using solid state drives to identify database scalability issues. Later this year we’ll do some runs on huge (2000+ node) supercomputers.

HPC is becoming part of mainstream computing, and that’s a nice way of saying it can’t fail. We have customers in production and they’ve provided us with a list of great features for our upcoming release. Some of them told us they wanted to use our SOA programming model in mission critical environments. With this CTP we provide the first of many mission critical features, disconnection/reconnection for SOA workloads. Say you submit a million Monte Carlo simulations to the cluster. In the past you would receive the calculations as they were completed, one by one. With our CTP you could submit from your laptop, disconnect, go home, play with the dog, sleep soundly, and come back in the morning to collect the complete set of results. We’ll have additional mission critical features in our future pre-releases.

HPC Server 2008 allowed people who weren’t supercomputing geniuses to set up and run a cluster, easily and quickly. Our CTP includes a number of enhancements to our distributed management infrastructure, including the ability to create custom heat maps and use 3^rd party reporting tools.

Using a cluster should be as easy as using any other network resource. Just like you can connect to a network printer and print jobs, you should be able to connect to a cluster, submit a computationally challenging job, and get the results. Our improved job scheduler includes a number of customer requested features including job progress and pre/post tasks. Pre/post tasks are cool because you can use them to set up and tear down compute nodes. Say you’re doing a bunch of genomic searches. With pre-tasks you could stage parts of the genomic database across your compute nodes, run your searches in parallel, and then clean up when you’re finished. Hey, it’s a simple map/reduce system.

Finally, we’re about to ship a new toolpack and it has our favorite new tool: Lizard. Lizard is a tuning wizard for the Linpack benchmark (get the name???). If you’re a Top500 geek you’ll love this tool. Using a set of parametric sweeps we identify the best input parameters for Linpack, helping you get a killer Linpack benchmark score. Oh, and it’s called Lizard. Did we mention the name? Hmmm… What could we call a GPU tuning wizard…

Back to the CTP. HPC is all about scale, performance, and applications. With this CTP we start with scale, and this Fall we’ll demonstrate performance as well as some exciting improvements to help application developers, from the Python/Excel users to MPI programmers and everyone in between.

More information on the CTP is at: http://www.microsoft.com/hpc.

Thank you!

Ryan Waite

Product Unit Manager Windows HPC Server

IIS Application Request Routing is Selected Winner in the Best in Load Balancing Category

IIS URL Rewriter is Selected Winner in the Best in URL Filtering Category

If you like blue ribbon-winning chocolate chip cookies, send me some. If you like award winning technologies that can help your business stand out in the crowd, read on.

Network Products Guide, an industry leading publication on information technologies and solutions, has named IIS Application Request Routing and IIS URL Rewriter as winners of their 2009 Best Products & Services Awards. These respected annual awards honor products and services that represent the rapidly changing needs and interests of the end-users of technology worldwide. As part of the tech-industry’s leading global awards program, this year’s Best Products & Services were nominated from all over the world.

More information, including how to download these and other IIS Extensions, can be found at www.iis.net/extensions.

Eric Rezabek

Senior Product Manager

IIS/Web

Here we are at the RC milestone of Windows Server 2008 R2, which usually indicates that we've hit the home stretch and we're marching straight ahead to RTM. Generally that's nothing new, but get set to smile, because this time we're not just marching home, we're adding new features, too!

So in addition to the cool features we've already announced for Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2, including  live migration, clustered shared volumes, hot add/remove of storage and improved networking support, I'm hugely please to introduce 64 logical processor support and processor compatibility mode for live migration! These are hugely powerful features that add both scale and flexibility to future virtualization deployment efforts.

64LP Support

We have seen processors grow from 1, 2, 4, and now 6 cores on a single processor, soon to hit 8.  Within the Windows Server 2008 R2 lifecycle, 64 logical processor servers will become commonplace (8 processors x 8 cores).  Virtualization is the natural fit for these next-gen servers, allowing them to consolidate a greater number of virtual machines on a single host. Hyper-V is in line with these hardware trends all with an eye towards bringing you greater VM density. The dev team has done a fantastic job in building and testing a platform that can scale.

Let's take a quick look at the history of logical processor support for Hyper-V:

• Server 2008 Hyper-V                                         16 LP Support
• Server 2008 Hyper-V +update (KB95670)      24 LP Support
• Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Original POR           32 LP Support
• Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V RC/RTM                   64 LP Support!

That's 4x the LP support from WS08 RTM! w00t!!

Processor Compatibility Mode for Live Migration 

Live Migration is the killer-feature in Windows Server 2008 R2!  Previous to the RC build of Windows Server 2008 R2, identical CPUs were needed across every node in the cluster in order to perform a live migration.  As we came closer to the RC milestone we got feedback from customers and partners asking, "What if I deploy additional nodes that contain newer processors with features not contained in the original nodes?"  Well, we've solved that problem due to tremendous effort by the Hyper-V development team.

Processor compatibility mode is very straightforward. It enables live migration across different CPU versions within the same processor family (i.e. Intel-to-Intel and AMD-to-AMD). However, it does NOT enable cross platform from Intel to AMD or vice versa. It works by abstracting the VM down to the lowest common denominator, in terms of instruction sets, which enables live migrations across a broader range of Hyper-V host hardware.

There are a few things to note: Processor compatibility mode is disabled by default but you can configure it on a per-VM basis. There are no specific hardware requirements other than the CPUs must support hardware assisted virtualization (i.e. Intel's IVT and AMD's AMD-V).

One Last Nod 

I also want to give a quick plug to a great friend and neighbor of Hyper-V, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2. SCVMM R2 will also have a release candidate and is expected around 30 days after Windows Server 2008 R2's RC. It has some great new capabilities like support for live migration, Clustered Shared Volumes (CSV), hot add/remove of storage and our network optimizations.

A couple of other  new and cool features coming in VMM 2008 R2, include new management functionality for storage migration (migrate storage of a running VM), SAN enhancements (iSCSI targets and SAN-based migration across clusters), rapid provisioning (template-based), maintenance mode (automate evacuation of VMs off of host machines), and host compatibility checks (live migration checks).

For more info check out SCVMM 2008 R2.

Many Links and Many Thanks 

For more info on these features check out the episode of Ask Ian embedded below , which features Jeff Woolsey; one of our masters of Hyper-V here at Microsoft.

Speaking of Hyper-V masters, I'd like to give a big shout out to Bryon Surace who gave me the skinny on all these new features!

One more tip of the hat to the folks at AMD for putting together the live migration video linked to earlier.

All right children, pencils down. No more answers, jottings, code tweaks – it’s release candidate time and we’re feature-complete. Okay, RC’s been available for a week now, but today is opening day at TechEd, and this is the first venue where we’ll be taking off the wrappers and offering the world a deep dive look at the new code. Including, by the way, some brand NEW features we’ve been saving for TechEd that can be found in the newest RC build.

First off, there’s the File Classification Infrastructure (FCI). With FCI, administrators can classify files not just by tagging, but by file characteristics, including content. They can then manage those files by policy. So, for example, an IT admin can decide that any file containing a social security number, be treated as secure, requiring encryption and backup to a specific location. Windows Server 2008 R2 will respect those policies for any file with an SSN even if those files are created after the policy was built and stored in different places on the network. We’ve made this technology extensible, too, meaning not only that IT admins will have more custom control, but also that third-party ISVs will be able to take advantage of FCI APIs to build new technology on top of R2.  For more info, check out.

But that’s not to say that we’re taking anything away from Hyper-V in R2. This is still the darling child of this release, and it, too, gets some more juice with R2 RC. For one, Hyper-V now supports up to 64 logical processors, double what we were supporting in Windows Server 2008. We’ve also added Processor Compatibility mode. Product manager, Isaac Roybal, goes into this in more detail in his blog post, but in a nutshell, administrators can now migrate VMs between physical hosts that are running different CPUs as long as those CPUs are Hyper-V-enabled and from the same proc manufacturer family.

And last, we’ve even shown some love to Windows Server Backup. This venerable in-the-box backup utility gets a serious upgrade with R2 RC. For one, you’ll find far more granularity available when designing a backup job – no more simply pointing at volumes. You can now backup specific folders, files and even file types, or exclude on that basis as well. System state backups are part of the GUI now as well, where before these were separate command line operations only. They’re also 5x faster and 7x smaller than in Windows Server 2008. And last, you’ve got more flexibility in targets, too. Where in previous versions, a dedicated and re-partitioned disk was your only option, you can now point a Windows Server Backup job at any network folder or volume.

There’s loads more goodness in Windows Server 2008 R2, so check out the Web site for more detail. And if you’d like to hear to truly well-informed pundits talk R2 RC, check out this edition of Ask Iain. Meanwhile, please try out the bits and let us know what you think.

--Oliver Rist