Another Beta Product from Microsoft

When Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates arrived At WinHEC 2007, he had a role in his mind. This was to announce the New server operating system from Microsoft i.e... Windows Server 2008. WinHEC (Windows Hardware Engineering Conference) is a trade show organized by Microsoft were the top level speakers from Microsoft speaks about the future of their company and announces any new product if launched.


After windows Server 2003, its chance for Windows Server 2008. Infect the R2 version of this server is in market. This new server OS has more than 4,000 policies which can applied by an administrator. Last week, Longhorn was officially named as Windows Server 2008. Microsoft has also announced that this would be the last 32 bit operating system. As we are moving into the new era of 64 bit computing, the next operating systems will be 64 bit.


Microsoft has announced its new server operating system “Windows Server 2008”, the code name of this was Windows longhorn. Till now, it has gone through 3 Beta stages. Beta 1 was released in 2005, Beta 2 was released last year and Beta 3 was released last month this year. I will mention the unique feature of



A New Role to Active Directory

The most important is the Windows Server Virtualization, which is used to Virtualize the server covered in my previous post about Global Warming. This Server has got a new role assigned it its Active Directory. This is Active Directory Domain Service, the features of its is the same, allowing network to manage the resources centrally, to set group policies for the users and centrally deploy applications to multiple computers. Apart from this overlapping features, it also has a special AD service called Federation Service using which the credentials of one enterprise can be shared with other trusted partners. As a result, a consultant can use his company’s user name and password to log on to client’s network.

No Need for a VPN

The Terminal service supports RDP 6.0. Now it is possible to share a single application instead of the whole desktop. Microsoft has given a straight competition to the VPN vendors like Avaya, CICSO and Check point by introducing feature of remote controlling a desktop over internet using its Terminal Services like Gateway, Web Access. They allow a desktop to be controlled over RDP or HTTPS over internet connection without any VPN deployed.

Some New Features

The new Virtual Domain controller, A read only Domain Controller resides in a low physical security area which will re-direct all the write attempts to a Full Domain controller.

The local administrators can login to a Server for maintenance task, no need for special domain admin privileges.

Policies using which administrator can restrict the network and other resource access on the individual level.

A powerful command line, called windows power shell.

Apply patches without re-booting the server, this service was also introduced in Windows Vista

This server is facilitated with improved IIS 7, and High-availability clusters.

Change the partition size without re-booting the server. Infact you can also change the size for primary partition.

Self healing NTFS, a new system service that runs in background and monitors the NTFS partition, detects any failures and automatically recovers the data, without the need to restart the server.



So What's Next from Microsoft....There is also the R2 Version of Windows Server 2008 in Market...Microsoft Will never Stop.