Windows Server 2008

How are you positioning yourself, your team, and your organization to succeed during this economic downtown?  Visit the Thrive site and learn how to enhance your skills, advance your career and elevate IT as the business leader.  Go ahead - find out how YOU can Thrive!

Want to see how Microsoft virtualization enables you to turn tactical decisions into strategy? Check out this webcast to learn how the platform capabilities of Microsoft virtualization solutions enable organizations to expand their infrastructure options without sacrificing existing investments.

Save $200 when you register now! Join 9,000 of your peers to explore current and soon-to-be-released Microsoft technologies including Virtualization and Windows Server 2008 R2.

Do you remember the tale of the Windows Server 2008 “Lone Server”? Maybe it was read to you as a bedtime story as a change from “Mommy, Why Is There a Server in the House?” There he was, this poor Windows Server 2003 server, all alone in a server farm of Windows Server 2008 machines. Out-of-date. Out-of-style. Out-of-touch with the needs of modern Web server administrators.

Well let’s hope the Windows Server 2008 computers didn’t laugh too heartily at his fate, because they’re about to suffer the same. Recently, in a typically convoluted Web 2.0 fashion, I Twittered an Ars Technica article describing how Netcraft noticed that many requests to www.microsoft.com were being handled by a server reporting as “Microsoft-IIS/7.5”. IIS 7.5 is the Web server in Windows Server 2008 R2, now available in Beta, that builds on all the good stuff in IIS 7.0 (that’s right: more reliable, more control, more secure, more choice), and integrates IIS Extensions such as FTP, WebDAV and the IIS Administration Pack. And of course, Windows Server 2008 R2 also provides full ASP.NET support on Server Core installations, and includes a new Web Administration module and IIS cmdlets for Windows PowerShell 2.0.

So what are the details of the Microsoft.com implementation? Well, although many requests are being served by IIS 7.5, we have not updated the entire server farm.  For example, in one cluster of servers we have left a single “Lone Server” running Windows Server 2008 to act as a control and provide side-by-side comparisons (and at weekends to go prop up a bar with Windows Server 2003 where they drown their sorrows together). There are still also full clusters running on Windows Server 2008 so that we can do a cluster-to-cluster comparisons and provide a greater degree of failover, although it is our plan to have Microsoft.com completely migrated to Windows Server 2008 R2 well before RTM.

From a hardware perspective, many of the HP servers on which Microsoft.com is hosted require no updates or reconfiguration, and we expect that customers with supported Windows Server 2008 hardware should find the same. However, we do have some older servers that we are replacing as part of a normal refresh cycle, so we are also looking to move more of the site to newer SAN-attached servers in the coming months.

Beta releases are usually about making sure features are functional, and with Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta, we are feature-complete. This means that our push to RC and RTM is about ensuring quality and improving performance. With that said, we are already seeing some positive indications regarding performance on the new servers thanks to some tweaks we’ve made in request processing and CPU utilization, but it’s too early to share any further details on that just yet. We are already running a sizeable chunk of Microsoft.com on the newer version of Hyper-V that ships in Windows Server 2008 R2, and we even have some of our Web servers running on Server Core installations, but again, we’ll need further analysis and testing before we can get more specific on the reliability and performance improvements you should expect to see from those enhancements.

Are you evaluating IIS 7.5 or thinking of migrating some or part of an existing site to it? Let us know!

David Lowe.

Looks like many of you are saving big money with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. And today we announced that, on average, it's $470,000 per customer per year. Not bad at all and very gratifying to see. Here's just one example provided today:

Saxo Bank had an average physical server utilization of just 20 percent and was deploying nearly 200 new servers per year before using server virtualization. Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V allowed the bank to reduce the number of servers needed by 36 percent and realize savings equivalent to $1 million (U.S.), because of lower server hardware costs and associated reductions in space, power and cooling costs

Besides the words and all, another interesting part were the videos seen at the site. You can see/hear from Saxo Bank, Banverket, Rand Morimoto (who wrote a book on Hyper-V), and a video featuring Santa Barbara Web Hosting and Microsoft's Bob Muglia.

Colleagues over at Windows Virtualization team blog have blogged that Microsoft's virt/management stack is about 1/3 the cost of VMware's comparable stack. And who can forget how they let the chips fall in Vegas.

I can't wait to hear more from customers running Windows Server 2008 r2 Hyper-V, and from those using live migration with a free product like the standalone Hyper-V Server 2008 r2.

Here's a video on customers who are saving with virtualization:

Cost Savings with Microsoft Virtualization

Patrick O'Rourke