Windows Server 2008

Don’t miss this half-day event in a city near you to help you better understand what SQL Server 2008 has to offer for your company. 

Attend this event to talk about and experience Microsoft virtualization solutions, hear from Microsoft virtualization experts on how Microsoft uses virtualization in its own data centers, dive into robust hands-on labs, and gain a technical understanding of the Microsoft virtualization strategy.

While I sit here at PDC, Ray Ozzie and Bob Muglia are announcing a new cloud computing platform - Azure Services Platform -that runs in Microsoft's network of datacenters. In case you couldn't make it to LA or watch the keynotes today, below is a short video of Bob providing an overview of the Azure Services Platform.

 

As Bob notes, this new platform opens the door for businesses to quickly address challenges and opportunities through cloud-based computing.  Relative to other cloud computing platforms, some of the advantages of Azure are that it provides a complete cloud platform while leveraging your businesses' existing IT skills sets and knowledge.  These advantages allow businesses to quickly extend existing applications or build new cloud applications.

Customers tell me that they want both on-premise IT and server infrastructure as well as to be able to leverage cloud-computing when it makes the most business sense. You might be asking whether Azure will replace Windows Server. The answer is simply no. Azure is not a platform or software that customers will run on their own internal servers. It runs in Microsoft's datacenters only and is optimized for cloud computing scenarios. We will continue to innovate and ship Windows Server for both on-premise application and infrastructure scenarios and will ensure that customers continue to have choice in choosing the platform that best meets their need, whether on-premise or in the cloud. 

I wanted to address another common question that has come up when I talk to IT professionals. They ask how Azure will change how they work. Azure provides a fundamental paradigm shift in what IT professionals manage. With the Azure Services Platform, IT operations will be focused on deploying, configuring and monitoring applications. The hardware, operating system and infrastructure management are abstracted away from IT professionals and developers to save them time by enabling them to simply focus only on applications. To learn more about this paradigm shift in what is managed, you can download Azure's Customer Technology Preview and run it on your local machine or watch some demo videos.

As I've said before in my blogs, the long-term success for Microsoft depends on our ability to deliver a platform that is open, flexible, and provides customers and developers with choice. This includes Microsoft and open source technologies working together. Now we enter the next era where customers have greater platform choice to innovate and deliver value, whether on-premise or via a cloud platform. 

Bill Hilf, General Manager, Windows Server

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In this video, Kyle Rosenthal demonstrates how to create a custom Windows PE environment - from obtaining the original image to being ready to deploy either via a bootable CD or USB drive. He demonstrates the file structure and how to prepare the Windows PE to be able to use in your deployments.

Learn how to use the OCS planning tool to build simple single server OCS configurations all the way to multi site multi server complex configurations which may include both voice and video. Also learn how to use the planning tool to lean about and plan your next OCS installation.

Learn how to extend the native OCS tracing engine to return plain English results readable by human beings. The example used centres around troubleshooting OCS client's login issues on an OCS standard server.

In this video Scott Golightly shows how to use the data compression feature of SQL Server 2008 Enterprise and Developer Editions. In addition to showing how to enable data compression, Scott discusses the effect it can have on the size of your table, when you may not want to use it, and shows examples of how to see if compression is having the desired result.

The Windows SharePoint Services Recycle Bin provides a recycle bin facility to the users of your site, including a multi-level restore capability available to site collection administrators. This feature provides some configuration and has some capacity implications, so join Hilton Giesenow as he describes how to configure and make use of the Recycle Bin.

Building off the great work done on Windows Server 2008, I’m happy to share that next week, a small group of Technology Adoption Program customers will be getting their hands on Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 (SP2) Beta. As we have done in the past, we routinely start testing a service pack release for Windows Server with a small group of testers first before making the beta more broadly available to the public. Windows Server 2008 helped make major strides in the areas of Web, Virtualization, and Security. SP2 builds upon this by enhancing the operating system for IT Professionals.

Windows Server 2008 SP2 addresses feedback from our customers. It contains all previously released fixes integrated into a single service pack covering both server (Windows Server 2008) and client (Windows Vista) versions. We adopted a single serviceability model for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista when we launched Windows Server 2008. Because of this, Microsoft can provide customers with a single, high-quality update that minimizes deployment and testing complexity.

In addition to the above, Windows Server 2008 SP2 contains two changes that will ease deployment and help reduce cost.

- Hyper-V RTM is included

- Additional changes to the power profile have yielded a 10% improvement over the power profile of Windows Server 2008 RTM

These two changes will help customers save money and ease deployment of Hyper-V for IT Professionals.

I’m very excited about SP2 and will share more information in the coming months.

 

Justin Graham
Senior Technical Product Manager
Windows Server Group

Dive into 250 in-depth sessions on Microsoft Exchange, Windows, SQL Server, SharePoint and .NET delivered by 150  Microsoft architects and industry experts. Every attendee receives SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition with 1 CAL. This event sold out last fall, be sure to register today!