RSSTop 10 New Features in Windows Server 2008
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published May 24, 2007, 7:37 PM
(continued from previous page)
#7: Kernel Transaction Manager. This is a feature which developers can take advantage of, which could greatly reduce, if not eliminate, one of the most frequent causes of System Registry and file system corruption: multiple threads seeking access to the same resource.
In a formal database, a set of instructed changes is stored in memory, in sequence, and then "committed" all at once as a formal transaction. This way, other users aren't given a snapshot of the database in the process of being changed - the changes appear to happen all at once. This feature is finally being utilized in the System Registry of both Vista and Windows Server 2008.
"The Kernel Transaction Manager [intends] to make it very easy to do a lot of error recovery, virtually transparently," Microsoft software engineer Mark Russinovich explained. "The way they've done this is with the [KTM] acting as a transaction manager that transaction clients can plug into. Those transaction clients can be third-party clients that want to initiate transactions on resources that are managed by Transaction Resource Manager - those resource managers can be third-party or built into the system."
#6: SMB2 network file system. Long, long ago, SMB was adopted as the network file system for Windows. While it was an adequate choice at the time, Russinovich believes, "SMB has kind of outlived its life as a scalable, high-performance network file system."
So SMB2 finally replaces it. With media files having attained astronomical sizes, servers need to be able to deal with them expeditiously. Russinovich noted that in internal tests, SMB2 on media servers delivered thirty to forty times faster file system performance than Windows Server 2003. He repeated the figure to make certain we realized he meant a 4000% boost.
#5: Address Space Load Randomization (ASLR) Perhaps one of the most controversial added features already, especially since its debut in Vista, ASLR makes certain that no two subsequent instances of an operating system load the same system drivers in the same place in memory each time.
Malware, Mark Russinovich described it (as only he can), is essentially a blob of code that refuses to be supported by standard system services. "Because it's isn't actually loaded the way a normal process is, it would never link with the operating system services that it might want to use," he described. "So if it wants to do anything with the OS like drop a file onto your disk, it's got to know where those operating system services live.
"The way that malware authors have worked around this chicken-and-egg kind of situation," he continued, "is, because Windows didn't previously randomize load addresses, that meant that if they wanted to call something in KERNEL32.DLL, KERNEL32.DLL on Service Pack 2 will always load in the same location in memory, on a 32-bit system. Every time the system boots, regardless of whose machine you're looking at. That made it possible for them to just generate tables of where functions were located."
Now, with each system service likely to occupy one of 256 randomly selected locations in memory, offset by plus or minus 16 MB of randomized address space, the odds of malware being able to locate a system service on its own have increased from elementary to astronomical.
![In this slide from Mark's presentation, he gets all the fluff and jargon out of the way in one massive 'memory dump."](http://images.betanews.com/media/805.jpg "In this slide from Mark's presentation, he gets all the fluff and jargon out of the way in one massive 'memory dump."") |
"This slide...this being a keynote, the marketing people had to make a pass through the deck. And this thing is technical, which is a little bit different from what they're used to, they didn't understand any of the slides. But they still wanted to feel like they were adding value, so they threw this slide in. And of course, I don't understand this slide. But I hope you like it.” Mark Russinovich, Microsoft technical fellow |
#4: Windows Hardware Error Architecture (WHEA). That's right, Microsoft has actually standardized the error - more accurately, the protocol by which applications report to the system what errors they have uncovered. You'd think this would already have been done.
"One of the problems facing error reporting is that there's so many different ways that devices report errors," remarked Russinovich. "There's no standardization across the hardware ecosystem. So that made it very difficult to write an application, up to now, that can aggregate all these different error sources and present them in a unified way. It means a lot of specific code for each of these types of sources, and it makes it very hard for any one application to deliver you a good error diagnostic and management interface."
Now, with hardware-oriented errors all being reported using the same socketed interface, third-party software can conceivably mitigate and manage problems, reopening a viable software market category for management tools.
Next: Windows sans windows...
...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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