March 17, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Test Center Tracker: Windows XP TKO's Vista in 10 rounds
Here at Save Windows XP campaign headquarters, we're not all anti-Vista. Some of us, notably Test Center Chief Scientist Tom Yager, have begun to see the light. For Tom, if you like Windows Server 2008 you'll want Vista too, because only Vista takes advantage of some nice WS08 features. This about-face from Tom's originally lukewarm reception of Vista was sparked by his quality time with the head-spinning new Server 2008, chronicled here.
And then there's our man on the Enterprise Desktop, Randall Kennedy, who refuses to abandon old prejudices. For example, because Vista requires significantly more resources than XP in order to run half as fast, Randall has the idea maybe Vista is a bloated pig. Randall's going so far as to argue that businesses can afford to skip the Vista upgrade entirely, and ride XP until the dawn of Windows 7, which is expected in 2009 or 2010. No, performance isn't the only reason to stick with XP. Read Randall's 10-point analysis, then consider adding your name to our Save XP list.
A torch for Frankenvista: Microsoft engineer Vijayshinva Karnure blogged his instructions for creating a "super" workstation OS based on Windows Server 2008 in mid February, and Randall Kennedy has been putting the concoction to the test ever since. For one, "Workstation" 2008 is snappier than Vista. For two, WS08's Server Manager rocks as a central control panel. For three, it can run Active Directory, Exchange, and other server applications, which of course can be wonderfully convenient for developers. If Server '08 sounds like your kind of desktop, don't miss "Weird, wild, wonderful Windows "Workstation" 2008."
Posted by Doug Dineley on March 17, 2008 06:00 AM
March 10, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Top 10 improvements in Windows Server 2008
1. Windows Hyper-V hypervisor-based, hardware-accelerated server virtualization supports 64-bit guests, VM snapshots, VM relocation, access to offline disk images, and reservation of physical peripherals and CPU cores for exclusive use by specific guest OS instances.
2. Network Access Protection enforces health and remote access policies to keep noncompliant and unauthorized clients off the internal and external network.
3. Vastly improved Terminal Services with HTTPS tunneling and RemoteApp double-click launch of server-hosted Windows applications.
4. HTTPS tunneling and TCP socket sharing allow publishing of services through a small number of restricted, heavily monitored sockets.
5. A new "majority quorum" model for fail-over clustering lets you assign a vote to each cluster node and also to a shared storage device, assuring that if any one fails there is still a majority to constitute a quorum. The quorum disk in a two-node cluster is no longer a single point of failure.
6. Server Core provides a stripped-down server install with only essential services, giving virtual guests a smaller footprint and streamlining the operation and security of main Windows roles such as DNS, DHCP, and file serving.
7. Next Generation TCP/IP dramatically improves network performance through regular, automatic adjustments of the receive window size per connection, though support is currently limited to Windows Server 2008 and Vista. Also big in Next Generation TCP is the offload of TCP processing to supporting NICs, so the server's CPU can concentrate on server processes instead of communication processes.
8. Transactional NTFS lets you define transactions for server-level operations (e.g., to copy files to a directory, create a registry entry, and register a DLL) to ensure that they all complete or that the entire operation rolls back.
9. Restartable Active Directory Domain Services allows you to stop and start directory services without rebooting the domain controller or interrupting other Active Directory services. That means Windows Server 2008 can still handle DNS, DHCP, WINS, and all other requests during directory maintenance.
10. Object-oriented PowerShell replaces the DOS box for command-line administration and scripting.
Honorable mentions: Also noteworthy are Windows Server 2008's extremely strong, flexible, and standards-compliant encryption and security, .NET 3.0 implemented in ASP.NET and throughout the user level, self-healing NTFS, read-only domain controllers, multi-path I/O, and WS08's full support for enhanced features in Windows Vista.
For a closer look at these features, see "Product review: Windows Server 2008 is the host with the most, and the perfect guest" and "Secrets of Windows Server 2008."
-- Sean McCown and Tom Yager
Posted by Doug Dineley on March 10, 2008 03:00 AM