Windows Server 2008

This week kicked off the Masters golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia. While thousands of fans cheer for their favorite player, each professional golfer will pick up a club, swing, and hope for the best.  What’s often overlooked in this story is the scientific precision that goes into making the clubs that golfers depends on to execute the game with. 

 

Callaway Golf, a leader in golf equipment, established its reputation on scientifically designed clubs that help golfers make personal breakthroughs on the course, whether it’s stopping the ball on the green or simply hitting it farther.  To sustain this superior level of quality, Callaway recently switched from a Linux-based high performance computing cluster to Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003. 

 

With Windows CCS 2003, Callaway is seeing an eightfold increase in performance, helping make engineers far more productive and enhancing their ability to deliver innovative, high-quality products. Also,  by choosing Windows CCS 2003 over Linux, Callaway Golf is benefiting from a solution that is easier to use, simpler to support and will save the company tens of thousands of dollars in software and maintenance costs.

 

Just a little science to keep in mind when you’re watching this weekend and hoping Tiger makes his birdie on the 18^th hole.

 

-Tina

Windows Server 2008 deployment will leverage many of the core concepts and tools provided in Business Desktop Deployment 2007 and extend those to Windows Server 2008. The new accelerator will offer comprehensive role-based guidance for all phases of deployment, aligned to IT Service Management best practices. It will also take advantage of new deployment features in System Center Configuration Manager 2007. This session introduces you to the differences between Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2000 deployment, and what is in store from the Solution Accelerators Team for automating Windows Server 2008 deployment.

Windows Server 2008 makes significant improvements in server manageability with a one-stop administrative solution called Server Manager. This streamlined management tool allows IT administrators to complete setup of Windows Server using the Initial Configuration Tasks page, and configure and manage server roles and features with prescriptive wizards and a unified management console. Server Manager is built on the Service Modeling Language (SML) platform, used to model complex IT services and systems in software, including structure, constraints, configuration, and best practices. This session presents and demonstrates the configuration and management capabilities of Server Manager, and discusses how Server Manager as an administrative solution leverages the model-based management infrastructure provided by the SML platform.

Get the latest technology and architectural information about Microsoft's corporate Web site and many other hosted business services such as Microsoft Update, MSDN, TechNet, and Communities. The system engineers share how they are leveraging the next generation Web platform stack including Windows Server 2008/Internet Information Services 7, SQL Server 2005, SharePoint/Microsoft Office SharePoint Services, and System Center Operations Manager.

This scenario-based walkthrough uses a series of demonstrations to offer an in-depth understanding of new and enhanced Group Policy functions in Windows Vista, and plans for the Windows Server 2008 timeframe. This session showcases Windows Vista as a Windows Vista Group Policy administrative workstation. Learn about new Group Policy features in Windows Vista, including the new format and functionality of Administrative Template (ADMX) files (and interop with legacy ADM files), the ADMX central store, improved awareness of changing network conditions, using multiple local Group Policy Objects (MLGPOs), and Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) integration into the operating system. Demos include using the new event viewer ("Crimson"), and showcase a selection of the hundreds of new policy settings delivered with Windows Vista. Finally, we provide an introduction to the products acquired from DesktopStandard and discuss their future availability and roadmap.

Microsoft will discuss the key platform features of the upcoming Windows Server Code Name "Longhorn" release. We aren't saying it slices bread, walks on fire, or leaps tall buildings in a single bound, but it does come with quite a few solid and cool things. This talk focuses on Windows Server "Longhorn" as a general-purpose server platform, offering ease of deployment, creation of manageable and secured server environment, and other features that make Windows Server "Longhorn" an ideal platform for IT server solutions. We'll also have a discussion of future server platform hardware technologies where we are focusing our engineering efforts.

Failover Clustering in Windows Server Longhorn (formerly known as Microsoft Cluster Service, or even "Wolfpack") has undergone significant enhancement from previous versions, and as a result what you knew about Failover Clustering in Windows Server 2003 may no longer be applicable. This presentation will highlight ten major areas of change, and how to make them work for you.

The session features a discussion of the virtualization technology roadmap and an outline of Microsoft's vision for how these technologies will combine with future capabilities in processors, chipsets, and I/O devices to enable unprecedented flexibility by the Windows Server platforms.

This session discusses the power management features in Windows Server. It details the motivation for power management in server systems, the importance in terms of total cost of ownership (TCO) and environmental impact, and what can be achieved today in Windows Server 2003 SP1 through Windows Server Longhorn. It concludes with a series of insights into the challenges that face future server platform designs.

This session discusses the new dynamic partition capabilities in Windows Server Longhorn. Hardware partitioning enables customers to create multiple isolated hardware environments on the server, each able to host a Windows Server operating system and applications. In a dynamically partitionable server, changes to the partition configuration can be implemented without interrupting operation of the applications in the affected partitions. This scenario requires the server to dynamically interact with the Windows Server Longhorn operating system in each partition to enable the operating system to process the requested hardware change to the partition. Details of this support in Windows Server Longhorn will be presented, and a demonstration of a dynamically partitionable Windows Server Longhorn will be shown.