Windows Server Division WebLog

NuStar Energy: IT for growth

WindowsServer — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:39:00 GMT

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.

NuStar Energy and Microsoft: Fueling Business Success

Guest Blog: How Information Technology (IT) Can Still Invest in Innovation Today

WindowsServer — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:30:00 GMT

Hi- I’m Joe Homnick, principal owner of Homnick Systems and a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner for Learning Solutions, located in Boca Raton, Florida. I am a Microsoft Regional Director Ambassador and trainer for the Microsoft Metro program, which targets early adopters of Microsoft technologies for the last five years.

I believe that as the world moves out of this recession, extending productivity through IT will be a major means for allowing business enterprises to succeed in a more competitive market and innovation should not be sacrificed. The results from the recent Microsoft survey (conducted by Harris Interactive) of 1200+ IT professionals, implementers and decision makers from the U.S., UK, Germany and Japan show ominous clouds hovering over investment in technology. Per the study 55% say the economy has changed the role of IT and 51% say that budget cuts are the biggest barrier to innovation, while only 22% say giving the business a competitive edge is their top priority. It appears that with reduced budgets, IT is much more concerned with “keeping the lights on” and are not focused on innovating as much as they have in the past.

There are two major areas that IT should look at in leveraging their dwindling budgets while still innovating; one is a new technology thrust and the other a tried and true method to extending productivity and innovation. To more efficiently implement innovation, businesses should be looking at a hybrid method of building their infrastructure into the future by including the concept of Cloud Computing along with the on-premise approach. Education is another area that should be invested in, so that innovations can be realized within the existing infrastructure and informed decisions about future directions in hybrid infrastructure expansion can be made.

Cloud Computing is quickly becoming a reality with major investments by Microsoft, Google and Amazon. Cloud Computing allows you to efficiently extend and scale your IT infrastructure into a shared internet environment and overcome two major investment concerns when an enterprise invests in new technology. The first of these concerns is the Cash Flow Curve of Costs to Utilization for new technology investments. The typical curve for private cloud cash expenditures is as follows:

Typically there are large cash expenditures for infrastructure well before there is utilization related to revenue/efficiencies to be realized on the private cloud investments. As utilization of the infrastructure takes place there is typically a period that occurs where over utilization of the resources occurs, which results in another capital expenditure to give greater capacity than is needed until once again utilization out strips capacity and the whole process of underutilization/overutilization takes place again. The Cloud Computing approach smoothes this Cost/Utilization by allowing the enterprise to only purchase the amount of computing power that they need to meet utilization requirements. Another issue that Cloud Computing addresses is daily Periodicity of Demand. The typical demand curve in a fully utilized system looks like the following:

The Y axis shows a measure of infrastructure capacity based upon simultaneous users while the X axis shows time within a day. As can be seen, the system is underutilized (yellow) through the majority of the day with a couple of spikes of overutilization (red). Of course, the overutilization spikes carry the added inefficiency of a not optimal computing environment. The Cloud Computing platform with its on demand scalability and pay as you go pricing model address both the cost curve and periodicity of demand concerns related to IT infrastructure expenditure.

Education is usually one of the first IT budget line items to be cut and this approach has a very negative effect on efficiency and innovation within IT. There are major concerns that return on the training investment is not sufficient. This is due to a consistent failure of the online training approach to deliver the needed skills while the expense of tried and true instructor led training is considered too high. The instructor led training expenses of lost time and travel can be mitigated by planning your training to take place locally or even having an instructor come into the enterprise. A hybrid method of local instructor led classes and take home labs with online assistance can greatly alleviate these education costs while still delivering the knowledge transfer required in maintaining efficiency and creating innovation.

As IT moves into a more limited budget cycle, hopefully it will look to a hybrid method of implementing infrastructure with a mix of private cloud and public cloud computing along with hybrid method of local instructor led training with online supported labs. This will allow for the efficiencies and innovation that can fuel productivity within the business enterprise, even within a constrained budget.

-Joe

What is the state of IT? Find out tomorrow with Microsoft’s Bob Kelly

WindowsServer — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:29:00 GMT

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.

Server & Tools Business Exec discusses state of IT, answers your questions on June 23

WindowsServer — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:33:00 GMT

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.

Not running Windows Server 2008 SP2 with Hyper-V? Well, you should be!

WindowsServer — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 22:15:00 GMT

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.

Windows Server Site Visits in July '09 (Open to US and Canada participants only)

WindowsServer — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 19:32:00 GMT

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

New Changes in Backup with Windows Server 2008 R2

WindowsServer — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 18:51:00 GMT

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

-Mary Allen

Download the New IIS SEO Toolkit Beta

WindowsServer — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:00:00 GMT

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

Windows Server 2008 R2 RTm and general Availability

WindowsServer — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:02:31 GMT

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

Windows Server 2008 and Windows vista SP2 Available for download!

WindowsServer — Wed, 27 May 2009 00:06:15 GMT

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

CTP of Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 available today!

WindowsServer — Wed, 20 May 2009 23:28:00 GMT

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 WINS TWO NETWORK PRODUCTS GUIDE READER TRUST AWARDS

WindowsServer — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:02:00 GMT

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

Hyper-V in WS08 R2 Release Candidate: Bringing More to the Table

WindowsServer — Tue, 12 May 2009 01:19:00 GMT

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.

More info on Windows Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate can be found here. Also make sure to check out Microsoft's Virtualization site for more information on Microsoft's all-up virtualization solutions.
Ask Iain: Virtualization

The Magic of Software Meeting Hardware

WindowsServer — Mon, 11 May 2009 00:04:00 GMT

Hello, I'm Margaret Lewis from AMD. Before I get into this entry, I’d like to thank the team at Microsoft for allowing me to guest post on their Windows Server blog. For those of you who know me, you know my passion is the software that is closest to the hardware. Call me crazy – but to me this union of software and hardware is where the magic happens.

Getting processor and operating system road maps to intersect is more of an art than a science, but it’s key to ensuring that all the software “in the stack” – all the software on a system, that is - runs smoothly. I’m happy to say that we have one of those magical moments happening between Microsoft Window Server 2008 R2 operating system and our six-core AMD Opteron processor, codenamed “Istanbul.”

So, to celebrate the release candidate of Windows Server 2008 R2, I’ll go into some of the reasons why these two pieces of technology are such a great combination of AMD and Microsoft technologies.

The first reason is rather obvious - the combination of Six-Core AMD Opteron “Istanbul” processors and Windows Server 2008 R2 offer support for larger core counts, enabling more robust computing environments for the demands of virtualization and databases. Beyond more support for more cores, these products can also help you “green” your IT. For example, AMD PowerNOW!, a feature that adjusts power consumption to core utilization, is turned on by default in Windows Server 2008, enabling power efficiency improvements and creating the ideal foundation for workloads that experience highs and lows in demand. Istanbul and R2 also provide support for “Core Parking,” a feature that helps to consolidate processing onto the fewest number of cores and then suspends the inactive cores, again helping to reduce energy consumption.

This is also a great foundation for virtualization. As virtualization adoption continues to grow, AMD and Microsoft continue with innovations that deliver a highly efficient virtualization platform. As you may know, Hyper-V, a core component of Windows Server 2008, supports AMD-V technology, including Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI), which handles the complexity of virtual machine memory management. And by dropping the hypervisor CPU time, customers can save memory requirements per VM.

One greatly anticipated feature of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V is the ability to migrate running virtual machines (VMs) so an IT manager can move VMs between physical servers without any noticeable down time. Live migration enables new levels of flexibility and fault tolerance within the data center (I encourage you to check out my post about live migration today on my blog here). If you want to see live migration in action, you should check out this video demonstrating Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V R2 performing live migration from a Quad-Core AMD Opteron^TM “Barcelona” processor to a 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron “Shanghai” processor.

This excellent meshing of the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor and Windows Server 2008 R2 builds on the collaboration that has helped to drive revolutionary innovation into x86 computing environment, including 64-bit computing, NUMA optimizations, multi-core capabilities and more.

This “magic” is the result of a lot of hard work by the dedicated engineers at AMD and Microsoft. The result is OS, hypervisor and processor technology that work seamlessly together, benefiting all the software running on the system.

What are your thoughts on the meeting of hardware and software? Have you had any “magic moments” lately? Leave your thoughts on this blog or @me on Twitter.

Margaret Lewis (@margaretjlewis) is a Product Marketing Director at AMD. Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

TechEd Welcomes Windows Server 2008 R2 RC

WindowsServer — Sun, 10 May 2009 23:56:00 GMT

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.

Ask Iain: Windows Server 2008 R2 RC

--Oliver Rist