Microsoft Talk

Offers Additional Opportunities for IT Pros and Hardware Vendors
Q&A: Bill Laing, corporate vice president of Windows Server and Solutions, says coming improvements in the Windows Server operating system will offer greater opportunities for customers and partners in areas such as virtualization and scalability.

In part:

What sort of reception has Windows Server 2008 been getting in the market?

Laing: There’s been a lot of excitement about this product and its momentum is still growing. For example, since its launch in February, we have seen more than one million downloads of the RTM versions of Windows Server 2008, and more than 500,000 customers and 90,000 partners trained on Windows Server 2008.

But the real measure of its success is the bottom-line svalue our customers have been experiencing. For example, earlier this year researchers at consulting agency Capgemini looked at several companies and institutions that were using Windows Server 2008. They found that Windows Server 2008 streamlined their IT operations and improved management, security and reliability. IT costs were reduced by up to $124,000 per year through staff efficiencies and reduced downtime.

How does Windows Server 2008 R2 differ from the previous version? What are the most notable new features?

Laing: We think it’s important to give customers a predictable timetable to plan for the next versions of our server technologies. We are working on an update release for Windows Server, named Windows Server 2008 R2, which is in line with the release cadence Bob Muglia outlined several years ago. As part of this update, we are integrating the latest service and feature packs with some new technology investments focused around four categories: virtualization, management, scalability and the Web.

From a virtualization standpoint, we’re building on our state-of-the-art virtualization technology with a newer version of our Hyper-V hypervisor technology as well as some new features that customers have been asking us for, such as Live Migration. This feature, which is included with Windows Server 2008 R2 at no additional charge, lets you move a running workload from one machine to another in milliseconds, with no loss of performance from the user’s point of view.

On the management front, Windows Server 2008 R2 will be a foundation for datacenter automation. We are making multiple improvements that give customers the reins to truly manage their servers the way they desire, whether that is locally or remotely, via a graphical user interface (GUI) or from the command line via Windows PowerShell. We are also making improvements to help customers reduce and better manage their datacenter power consumption. Windows Server 2008 R2 can automatically turn processor cores on and off based on the workload of the system, or reduce the power consumption by adjusting processor speed.

Another area of innovation in Windows Server 2008 R2 is the ability to more easily administer and support Web applications on a streamlined Web platform. We’ve integrated Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS) manager extensions to make it simpler to administer local and remote Web servers, and added support for ASP.NET and PHP to the Server Core.

And finally, we continue to invest in scalability. In Windows Server 2008 R2, we have built in support for up to 256 logical processors, which will allow our customers to more fully exploit today’s powerful CPUs, deploying only the features they choose and scaling those solutions to meet their organization’s needs.