Win Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 move ahead in lockstep
At its Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC), Microsoft made it clear that Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 Release 2 (R2) truly are joined at the hip.
During the WinHEC Day 2 keynote, Corporate Vice President of Windows Server and Solutions Bill Laing showed off a number of the new features that Microsoft will deliver in Windows Server 2008 R2 -- a k a "Windows 7 Server -- when it ships in the next year or so. Among them: Support for up to 256 logical processors; branch-office caching, "Bitlocker to Go" drive encryption and other new technologies designed to work "better together" with Windows 7.
(As far as actual ship targets go, last week, Microsoft Senior Vice President of Server and Tools Bob Muglia told me that Microsoft's goal is to deliver Windows 7 client and server as closely, timing-wise, as possible. "We are planning to ship on the same day as they [the Windows client team] do," Muglia said. If the server team makes good on that date, the R2 release might hit in 2009, not 2010, as officials have said they expect to do.)
Laing showed off the Windows Server 2008 R2 features that the company has been rolling out to testers as part of the M3 "Milestone 3" release. Microsoft is making Windows Server 2008 R2 M3 available to attendees of last week's Professional Developer Conference (PDC), WinHEC and other select Microsoft customers and partners. Among those features:
- Direct Access support, eliminating the need for VPN connections for secure communications
- Branch-office caching (hosted server caching)
- Version 2.0 PowerShell and Hyper-V releases
- Support for .Net and PowerShell in the Server Core role
- Live migration support within Hyper-V
- Terminal Services gets repositioned and renamed as Remote Desktop Services
One of Laing's main focuses during his hour-long keynote was on the ramped-up multiprocessing support that will be part of Windows Server 2008 R2. (Last week, Microsoft posted a video to its Channel 9 Web site which explained that Windows 7 also would support up to 256 processors.)
Laing noted that Microsoft currently licenses its server proucts by socket, or procesor, rather than by core. Multiple processing units typically reside on a physical processor. Logical processors can be core-based or thread-based, by design, he added. Windows Server today can support up to 64 logical processors. The R2 release, as a result of changes to the kernel, application programming interfaces, tools and user-interface, will be able to support up to 256 logical processors, Laing said.
Laing and Quentin Clark, the General Manager of SQL Engine at Microsoft, showed a demonstration of Windows Server 2008 R2 running on a 192-logical-processor IBM server, as well as on a 256-processor Hewlett-Packard server. The SQL Server "Kilimanjaro" release, due in 2010, will be able to take advantage of this multiprocessing support, Clark said. Already, in tests, Kilimanjaro is handling the load consistently and evenly across these hundreds of logical processors, Clark added.
At the end of the WinHEC Day 2 keynote, Laing and his colleagues provided a "sneak peek" of some of the new features that will be part of Hyper-V Version 2. These will include second-level address translation, support for up to 32 logical processors (up from 24 in Version 1); Live Migration; core parking (reducing the number of cores for power-management purposes); "Chimney" TCP/IP process offloading; and Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ) support.
What's your take? Are there enough new features in Windows Server 2008 R2 (which Microsoft is calling a "minor" update) to make you consider moving to that release -- either with or without Windows 7 along side it?