The Guy that ran this session was an absolute comedy genius! Apart from the vision of him suddenly bursting out with "Praise be to Jesus!!!!", "Praise be to God!!!" in a Little Britain Styley, he managed to keep the audience entertained for 1 hour 45 minutes and still managed to present some very neat features of Windows 2008 Server. The entire talk was based on the Longhorn idea and why its a good/bad idea to name an operating system after a COW! (He didnt actually work for Microsoft so I guess he could get away with more).
Stuff I picked up on...
Windows 2008 Server line-up confirmed ship date of 27th February.
WinRM is replacing RPC.
Reliability Monitor introduced
(Front end to event viewer and gives you a score for previous month). You can use this to determine when a system started to mess up and you can restore to before that point in time. Also can be used to measure up time and performance statistics over time.
Server Manager Introduced
Part of the "Vista/2008 Admin Games Pack". Apparently because the stuff you used to know how to do will now cause you to play games with the server until you find out where its now gone to and how to do it.
MOM Microsoft Operations Manager
Replacement to performance manager which looks similar to spotlight for windows.
Self generating Registry key policies for group policy
Multicast Windows Image Files (*.wim) files to desktop workstations.
Hypervisor (Arrives ~ six months post-Longhorn)
Option for Longhorn and Server Core. Similar notion to VMWare ESX, Built to exploit AMD Pacifica/V and Intel Vanderpool//VT's new op-codes. Ends up without Live Migration so no VMotion type capabilities!!!! Possibility of adding at a later date "Apparently".
Network Access Protection (NAP)
Allows pc's entering a domain to be quarantined until it is deemed healthy enough to be connected to the domain/network.
Policies can be set up to say for e.g. "no XP box gets on the network unless it's got SP2 and patches X, Y and Z.
SMB 2.0 offers (Server Message Block) Vista -> 2008 transfers only.
Larger dynamic block sizing - Significantly better file transfer speed. More robust, handles short network glitches better. Apparently 2.5x - 3.0x quicker.
IIS 7.0
No more metabase; sites are configured with an ASCII text XML file called ApplicationHost.config. Very nice and much simpler to pair a site down to its basics, which makes for faster code and more security.
Terminal Services Gets Better
SSL connections , runs on RPC over HTTP.
TS Gateway lets you get past firewalls. Remote execution of an application which looks like it is being run locally.
A SQL Server In Every Box
Longhorn implements "Windows Internal Databases" which means that out of the box Longhorn will have Database functionality like SQL Server 2005. It's basically SQL Server 2005 Express.
DNS Changes
DNAME functionality allows old.com to effectively redirect to new.com.
Server Core
"I want a server OS without the GUI!" I.e. Linux! Server core doesnt quite get there but it is a reduced-function version of Server. This should improve performance for servers running under Server Core. Stops .NET, MMC, IE. This means VM Servers can get away with less RAM. 200mb of RAM suddenly becomes enough! Server Core servers don't need the patches a full blown GUI/Service rich server needs so less WSUS updates need pushing out. Things that work:- Notepad, TaskMgr. TM's, Regedit, vbscript, DnsCMD, WevtUtil, and even edlin!?!?
There are some really cool features in all this which should allow us to...
a) Run servers requiring less memory and better still less patching (and therefore less restarts of servers on patch day)
b) Stop non authorised "Foreign" machines being given full access to the LANCS domain. This I believe has always been an issue for ISS and the quarrentine functionality within Longhorn is a very neat solution!
Sorry no Picture for this one!
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