Monday, November 10, 2008

Microsoft Demos Windows Server 2008 R2

Bill Laing, vice president of Windows Server and Solutions, and Rob Williams, Microsoft's senior program manager, presented and demonstrated Windows Server 2008 from the small business to the enterprise. Specifically, they presented Windows Server 2008 R2, which will tentatively be released in 2010.

The keynote started with a presentation of 24 categories of Windows Server 2008, from home server up to enterprise class server flavors.

The first product presented was the upcoming Small Business Server and Essential Business server updates to Windows Server 2008. These will be presented on November 12 on the Microsoft Web site, hedreamserver.com. Essential Business Server is aimed at small- and medium-sized businesses that need server functionality but don't already have a server.

The meat of the presentation was several demos of the upcoming Windows Server 2008 R2. R2 is currently in pre-beta, and the full beta is expected next year. As previously announced, R2 will be 64-bit only, with support for x64 and Itanium. R2's features include streamlined management tools, integration with Windows 7, an enterprise class foundation, and enhancements for virtualization and consolidation.

Windows 7 support will include the seamless integration of Windows 7 PCs with the corporate environment, whether that PC is on the corporate LAN or on the Internet.

Laing and Williams demoed a Windows 7 PC that was connected to the Internet and the Microsoft corporate network, even though the PC is physically in Los Angeles and the corporate LAN is in Redmond, Wash. The PC connected seamlessly without the need for extra VPN software. The Windows 7 PC was also subject to corporate group policy updates, in this case a mandate that external USB drives be encrypted with BitLocker.

They also demoed enterprise-class scaling with a SQL server running 192 logical cores (combination of "real" silicon and HyperThreading). R2 will be scalable up to 256 logical cores, up from the current 64 core support in Windows Server 2008.

Last but not least, there was a demo of Hyper-V, the latest in Windows Server virtualization. Hyper-V was shown running instances of Vista, Windows Server 2003 with multi-core and 64-bit support, and Linux. The last demo was when Williams moved a running VM from one physical node to another, without any hiccups or having to reboot the VM. To the end user, this would've seemed like nothing had happened.

Source:pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2334055,00.asp

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