Windows Server 2008

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 Quad-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.

 

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