At its Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC),
Office Pro Plus 2010 Key, Microsoft made it clear that Windows seven and Windows Server 2008 Release two (R2) truly are joined at the hip.In the course of the WinHEC Day 2 keynote, Corporate Vice President of Windows Server and Solutions Bill Laing showed off numerous the new functions that Microsoft will provide in Windows Server 2008 R2 — a k a “Windows 7 Server — when it ships inside 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 seven.(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 supply Windows seven client and server as closely,
Office Standard 2010, 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 characteristics 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 attributes: Direct Access support, eliminating the need for VPN connections for secure communicationsBranch-office caching (hosted server caching)Version 2.0 PowerShell and Hyper-V releasesSupport for .Net and PowerShell inside the Server Core roleLive migration support within Hyper-VTerminal Services gets repositioned and renamed as Remote Desktop Services One of Laing;s main focuses in the course of 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 seven 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,
Windows 7 32bit, Laing said.Laing and Quentin Clark,
Office 2010 Home And Business, 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,
Windows 7 X64, Kilimanjaro is handling the load consistently and evenly across these hundreds of logical processors, Clark added.In the end of the WinHEC Day 2 keynote, Laing and his colleagues provided a “sneak peek” of some of the new functions that will be part of Hyper-V Version two. 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 attributes 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 seven along side it?