RSSTop 10 New Features in Windows Server 2008
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published May 24, 2007, 7:37 PM
There are a myriad of both subtle and fundamental differences in the basic architecture of Windows Server 2008, which could dramatically change not only the way it's used in the enterprise, but also the logical and physical structure of networks where it's the dominant OS.
The abilities to consolidate servers, to manage hardware more effectively, to remotely manage hardware without the graphical traffic, and to radically alter the system security model, could present a more compelling argument for customers to plan their WS2K8 migrations now, than the arguments for moving from Windows 2000 to Server 2003.
Based on the information we gathered last week at WinHEC 2007 in Los Angeles, we decided that rather than list a bunch of mind-jarring new categories and marketing terms that sound like rejected gadgets from the Bat-Cave, we'd select what we believe to be the ten most influential and important new technologies to find their way into WS2K8, with the help of Microsoft software engineers such as Mark Russinovich to explain their relevance. We begin at the end with our #10 entry:
#10: The self-healing NTFS file system. Ever since the days of DOS, an error in the file system meant that a volume had to be taken offline for it to be remedied. In WS2K8, a new system service works in the background that can detect a file system error, and perform a healing process without anyone taking the server down.
"So if there's a corruption detected someplace in the data structure, an NTFS worker thread is spawned," Russinovich explained, "and that worker thread goes off and performs a localized fix-up of those data structures. The only effect that an application would see is that files would be unavailable for the period of time that it was trying to access, had been corrupted. If it retried later after the corruption was healed, then it would succeed. But the system never has to come down, so there's no reason to have to reboot the system and perform a low-level CHKDSK offline."
 | Microsoft's SysInternals software engineer Mark Russinovich, opening one of the most well-received hours of WinHEC 2007 last week. |
#9: Parallel session creation. "Prior to Server 2008, session creation was a serial operation," Russinovich reminded us. "If you've got a Terminal Server system, or you've got a home system where you're logging into more than one user at the same time, those are sessions. And the serialization of the session initialization caused a bottleneck on large Terminal Services systems. So Monday morning, everybody gets to work, they all log onto their Terminal Services system like a few hundred people supported by the system, and they've all got to wait in line to have their session initialized, because of the way session initialization was architected."
The new session model in both Vista and WS2K8 can initiate at least four sessions in parallel, or even more if a server has more than four processors. "If you've got a Vista machine where this architecture change actually was introduced, and you've got multiple Media Center extenders, those media center extenders are going to be able to connect up to the Media Center in parallel," he added. "So if you have a media center at home, and you send all their kids to their rooms and they all turn on their media extenders at the same time, they're going to be streaming media faster from their Vista machines then if you had Media Center on a XP machine."
#8: Clean service shutdown. One of Windows' historical problems concerns its system shutdown procedure. In XP, once shutdown begins, the system starts a 20-second timer. After that time is up, it signals the user whether she wants to terminate the application herself, perhaps prematurely. For Windows Server, that same 20-second timer may be the lifeclock for an application, even one that's busy spooling ever-larger blocks of data to the disk.
In WS2K8, that 20-second countdown has been replaced with a service that will keep applications given the signal all the time they need to shut down, as long as they continually signal back that they're indeed shutting down. Russinovich said developers were skeptical at first about whether this new procedure ceded too much power to applications; but in practice, they decided the cleaner overall shutdowns were worth the trade-offs.
Next: Microsoft builds bigger, badder, better errors...literally
...and by the time it's actually released, it will only have 5 of these features. The rest will be dropped in order to meet some fictitious, self-imposed marketing deadline.
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M$ sucked
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"...[that] Microsoft has ever produced". I suppose we could say "welcome to the party; let's party like it's 1999"... but seriously, this is good news - especially if it's not expensively in excess of Server 2003 hardware requirements.
One question: On 2K8 Server Core, can we guarantee that no IE or Outlook software is in the system image at all? I hear the sound of battalions of security Whac-A-Mole pumping their fists in the air in jubilation...
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Finally,Microsoft came to know about the unix power,and trying to be like that!!!!
NO GUI!!!!! It's gonna suck to regular MS users!!!!
More Complicated...Less User friendly...Less HACKABLE!!!!
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Yes then it will less user friendly.
but Why Microsoft going to do this from
GUI to again Console base interface ?
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At least it's not Windows Me....
Or is it? lol Some think so....
Though I personally like it a lot more than Win2k3 and I have been using it since the first leaked alpha build many years ago and every beta build since. It rocks!
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The Windows Server 2003 codebase is as solid as it gets. That's why MS scrapped two years worth of Vista and rebuilt it using Windows 2003.
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hm..
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Great article and detailed review.
My only complaint is that there's a pretty big feature that didn't make it into the top 10 -- a feature that has well over 100 partners and a growing technology segment -- Network Access Protection (NAP), which of course is Microsoft Netowrk Acess Control (NAC) solution.
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I agree with that..
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Gee, didn't Microsoft tell the DOJ that Windows was so completely interdependent that they couldn't remove anything. Now they they toss the whole GUI! It makes me begin to doubt Microsoft's sincerity.
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uh, gee, this is a new version of Windows...they were being sued over Windows 2003. They could do whatever they want with 2008, new version, new features, new design...I guess some people just don't understand that logic. ;/
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So we can look forward to the version of Windows that can be customized with any vendors modules and tailored to specific purposes by system builders with any software they choose to use.
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Dude, that was 10 years ago!! It was actually Win98 and they were referring to IE. MS has since added an option to allow another browser as the default.
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The upshot being that (then) anyone can extend it to crash more often and still blame it on Microsoft.
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K, well... hmmm
Being a UNIX/Linux/Windows SA... not sure if I'm really enthusiastic about this or not.
It would be nice to finally see windows go headless/no gui. Though As said before by Dave, too little too late.
I'm still waiting for Microsoft to do something revolutionary and evolutionary that doesn't emulate something that already exists in the market. Seems like they are constantly playing catchup trying to keep up with the rest of the world, while fronting that they are the leading and bleeding edge.
As for Vista... I seriously expect this OS to kill MS. There is no real reason for anyone to go to it other than to say "Dude, I've got Vista!"... Now for gamers, they may be somewhat forced into it because of DirectX10 only being Vista and now games only being released for Vista. However, I think these vendors will get the hint if their sales don't go any where because (I feel) most won't want to upgrade an OS to play a new game.
Good luck MS, but I still think you're going the wrong way in a one way street.
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"As for Vista... I seriously expect this OS to kill MS."
Yea, sure. Just don't hold your breath.
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I disagree, people will upgrade to Vista to play games. They might not pay for it, or they will be buying a new system so they can get that extra 10 fps on their favorite game. I a year you won't have a choice, if you buy a new system you'll get Vista.
As for those with old systems, they don't have the systems to play new games, so by definition aren't part of the gaming market, unless you count the 5 dollar value bin games at Walmart.
Vista itself might not sell Vista, but vendor support will force Vista on people just as Win ME/2k was forced on users that didn't want to reboot every hour (to the ban of those that chose ME).
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It's curious to see how fast Mark Russinovich (from the recently bought SysInternals) has already become a frontman for M$... Maybe the guy really wanted some fame or something...
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Woah! Pick on Russinovich and folks will get mad. The guy is a frickin' genious!
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Too little too late.
Yeah, like I'm going to even consider anything Microsoft Server based beyond Server 2003.
Vista sucked. The latest version of Longhorn Server Beta has sucked.
Microsoft is really really eating the brown log here.
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Since Vista SP1 is said to share the same kernel as Server 2008, what does that mean for Vista? Which features/aspects of Server 2008 will it be picking up, if any, because of this?
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That's a good question, but I don't think many of these server features will be in Vista. Yes, they will share the same kernel when SP1 is released, but I doubt these 10 features are located within the kernel itself.
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I'll bet the majority of these features touch the kernel in some way. It's windows "heart." You don't change windows without looking at the impact of the kernel.
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the Viridian project will still provide enterprises with the single most effective tool to date for reducing total cost of ownership...to emerge from Microsoft.
I love how they threw that last bit in there. ...to emerge from Microsoft. Just so we all know it's still light-years behind the stuff from their competitors.
At least they're not trying to tell us it's better than ESX for instance.
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Did you see that the first release won't support live migrations?
Virtualization is on its way to being a commodity and as such MSFT has no choice but go go heavy into this market.
But as you point out, there's no way Viridian will be able to hold a candle to ESX within the next 2 years.
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Hmmm... Setting live migrations aside and with the understanding and acknowledgement that VMWare has been in the Vm business for years...
please do detail exactly what puts ESX 'light-years' beyond Viridian (without the sarcasm or jokes or the rehearsed sales pitch)?
(NOTE: I am assuming your comments/response come from deep knowledge of both products including extensive beta testing along with detailed knowledge of both vendors roadmap [12-18months ahead]. If not... what do you base your comments on?).
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#1: Server Core = GUI-free server OSes
Novell and UNIX had this ability 15 years ago or more.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
It looks like we've gone full circle.
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Do you remember pre-windows history? There was a MS OS named DOS and many of the commands can still be performed today in all versions of Windows. DOS can't compete with a UNIX shell, but it can accomplish MUCH more than NetWare. At one point, you had to install DOS to even install NetWare.
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Ahhh....the good old days.
/sarcasm
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Re: #8 Clean Service Shutdown
More time for a high-jacked app by a Trojan is a golden opportunity to get to the system when the system may be weak.
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Haha, that marketing slide/comment was helarious
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is it me or "The new session model in both Vista and WS2K8 can initiate at least four sessions in parallel" sounds ridiculous compared to what the various UNIXs have always been able to do ?
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I don't think he did a good job explaining the feature. All modern OS can initiate multiple sessions, but they aren't truly in parallel due to time-slicing of the processor. It sounds like that for certain processes, true parallel computing is possible. One process per CPU with no time-slices.
If I am wrong, please correct me.
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Every operating system has critical sections that are non-reentrant. Doesn't matter how many processes, threads, or CPUS you have only one can execute in a critical section at time. What they have done is break up the bottleneck critical section into several critical sections so that more logins can be doing something instead of waiting for access to a critical section.
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dope. looking 4wd.
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Funny, I didn't see Four Wheel Drive listed as an option.... :p
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longhorn is powerful
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ok?
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