A Run Through Windows Server 2008

amcdiarmid writes "Tom's Hardware has a review of Windows Server 2008 RC0 up on their site. It has a few good points, and at 19 pages is certainly 'in-depth'. From the article's conclusion: 'Microsoft has used the time since the release of Windows Server 2003 very well. The new Server Manager simplifies system administration immensely. Unlike Windows Vista, whose new dialogues still confuse even experienced users, Windows Server 2008 makes the admin feel right at home and in control ... However, it's not all sunshine, either. Although our test system used a beefy Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 with generous 2 GB of RAM, the Server's user interface felt sluggish with Windows being drawn very slowly ... Microsoft also gets low marks for failing to include SSH support in the operating system. On Linux servers, working without SSH is simply unthinkable. At least the Redmond company includes its encrypted remote shell WinRS. However, secure FTP is still a missing feature. The FTP client is being treated like an unloved stepchild, to the point where it is not even included in the Server Manager.'"

Comments

Of course it's slow

[Farakin]

It needs all that memory for the new Windows Server Aero features!

Re:Of course it's slow

[geeknado]

Obviously, you're joking, but actually Aero /is/ available as an optional install for Server 2008, according to TFA. Of course, so is a shell-only server, which I would've liked to have seen broken down a bit more. How're the command line management tools? Etc.

Re:Of course it's slow

[Anonymous Coward]

If you'd RTFA, youd learn that Server '08 doesn't have Aero. It doesn't even have hardware-accelerated graphics support(By default) and renders the whole desktop in software. Sounds stupid, until you find your server's crashed because of bad graphics drivers. Server '03 EE is the same way.

Re:Of course it's slow

[MindStalker]

Believe it or not, many people use the server version as a desktop OS.
Usually this is people with too much money who want as many toys as possible in setting up their home network... seriously...

Re:Of course it's slow

[tshak]

Believe it or not, many people use the server version as a desktop OS.

Yup. I run Win 2008 RC0 for development and it's great. As an aside, I dunno what was wrong with their setup to cause a "sluggish" UI. My setup only has 1GB and a single core. It is running in Virtual PC which is hosted on Windows Vista. Not exactly a setup for speed, but it's very snappy.

Re:Of course it's slow

[tlhIngan]

Believe it or not, many people use the server version as a desktop OS.
Usually this is people with too much money who want as many toys as possible in setting up their home network... seriously...

Actually, I've heard of *gamers* running Server 2003 because it's even faster than XP at a lot of things. Of course, installing DirectX is a tiny bit of a challenge, but once that's done, they manage to get performance boosts (small ones, I believe) over regular XP.

Maybe what will happen is when Server 2008 comes out, people migrate to that instead of the horrific mess that is Vista (I used it) just because it's more familiar than the new locations where Vista puts crap. Might be interesting to see how many people do the XP->2008 transistion over XP->Vista.

Re:Of course it's slow

[nostriluu]

It's for better screen saver visualization for server room tours. Those GL Pipes were getting so old.

Wall building?

[ktappe]

Without SSH and SFTP, does it seem as if Microsoft is trying to build a wall between itself and Linux? To what end I'm not sure, but this is starting to seem deliberate.

Re:Wall building?

[Alioth]

Not Linux, but the rest of the computing world. Every other OS, including router operating systems like Cisco IOS, comes with ssh these days. Solaris has it. OS X has it. Cisco IOS has it (even their wireless access points have ssh). BSD of course has it. So does Linux. Microsoft is the only OS vendor that doesn't have an ssh server by default.

Re:Wall building?

[betterunixthanunix]

They want to differentiate themselves from Unix, in that you should never need such things. Historically, Windows hasn't been command line oriented anyway, and remote access is done with Remote Desktop. Things aren't really character stream oriented in Windows, and for security you are supposed to use IPSec. That's their model of "a better Unix than Unix," if I can be so bold as to reference my own handle.

Re:Wall building?

[jollyreaper]

They want to differentiate themselves from Unix, in that you should never need such things. Historically, Windows hasn't been command line oriented anyway, and remote access is done with Remote Desktop. Things aren't really character stream oriented in Windows, and for security you are supposed to use IPSec. That's their model of "a better Unix than Unix," if I can be so bold as to reference my own handle. Right, Windows has never seemed to be CLI-oriented, there are a few tricks you use in there but for the most part they want you clicking windows. HOWEVER, I've also heard that Exchange 2008 has gone all CLI-happy. Now I know that you can create some super-duper admin scripts with Exchange 2003, using it to do mass import/export of addresses and other tasks that would be input-intensive if you had to do it by hand. You also have tools like that for dealing with user creation at the domain controller as well. But as I was told, even routine tasks are supposed to be handled from the dos box with no GUI equivalent means of invoking the commands. That all seems to be going dead against what's seemed to be the typical Windows design philosophy. Can anyone with experience confirm or debunk?

Re:Wall building?

[Stamen]

And this is the fundamental problem with using Microsoft technology. You can argue about this or that, but the main reason I don't spend much time using it is because it limits my skills. If you learn Microsoft technology, then your are basically limited to Microsoft technology; because they so often refuse to use standards, and insist on going their own way. If you learn Unix technologies, your skill is transferable to almost every other OS except Windows.

It's a brilliant business move by Microsoft, and the reason that IT people who work in Microsoft shops are so defensive of their technology. If their company changes to anything else, they will have very limited applicable skills.

I personally work with OS X and Linux, but if everyone wanted to change to Solaris, I could care less, after a day of getting adjusted, I'd be back up to full speed.

Re:Wall building?

[Kyojin]

I almost prefer it that way. I'd hate to think what a pig's breakfast Microsoft would make out of an ssh server.

It would be incompatible with every client except the new microsoft ssh client they'd release with it. It would be full of security holes until at least microsoft ssh server service pack 2. It would be unstable and sometimes require a registry setting to be manually edited, and sometimes not, depending on what order a seemingly unrelated update made its changes in. It would be integrated in to the os such that if the ssh server crashed, the entire os would crash. After enough people complained and enough law suits, they would introduce rudimentary support for non-microsoft ssh clients, but these would occasionally corrupt data. Then they would implement their own version of X forwarding. Not by using the pre-existing remote desktop connection code, but by writing an entirely new powertoy client and a server plugin. Horrible things would occur if one attempted to connect to a server that didn't support graphics forwarding when the powertoy was installed on the client. There would be no fallback option to overcome this feature. 640KB would be the maximum graphics memory that any single application could forward if everything else miraculously worked.

Have I missed anything? Probably.

Re:Wall building?

[Stamen]

It is true, that there should be different options for different people, I'd hate a world where only OS X or Linux existed. Ideally, a few major players would exist that had equal market share; this would be good for everyone as it fosters competition (like what happened when Firefox started to takeoff, people who like IE enjoyed Microsoft's renewed interest in adding new features to it).

But really, Microsoft guys are safe in not ever needing to cross over. I have a few problems with this:

* One is I started out as Microsoft developer, some VB, but mostly Visual C++. I also worked at a company that did a lot of FoxPro and some Visual J. You're to young to remember this, as you're just starting out, but the problem with knowing non-standard technologies, is they can and will be taken away from you. I mentioned FoxPro and Visual J, because those were, and those developers were left high and dry. Heck, I know plenty of VB developers that complain bitterly about Microsoft dropping them (and no, VB.NET isn't VB, other than in appearance). VB was one of the most popular languages, and Microsoft just dropped it. Once you've been around for a while, you see this happen time and time again; your .net knowlege, in the future, will be just as useful as FoxPro knowlege is now. Sure c# is a standard, but it won't matter when Microsoft decides to switch to Foo++ language and none of their tools support c# anymore.

* The other problem I have is that the world is far from black and white. And even all Microsoft shops will have 3rd party tools come into their domain and they will have to work with them. Plus companies need to work with other companies, and you can't control what they will have. You WILL be exposed to non-Microsoft technology, and your boss WILL expect you to make it work, NOW. After years and years of this, you start to change your mind about what you should be learning.

Microsoft can make excellent tools that support industry and de-facto standards. And they would be very good at this, and they would make lots of money. But they refuse too, because "lots of money" isn't "all the money", and thus isn't good enough for them. I supported them for a long, long time; but like an abusive father, one day you start to punch back, and then you leave; because you realize, it's just not worth it anymore.

... at 19 pages ...

[trolltalk.com]

> "and at 19 pages is certainly 'in-depth'."

19 pages - more pages to serve adverts. A few paragraphs on each page, and on "print" so you can't just read the whole thing in one page.

Come off it - take away the pictures, and the whole articles is a couple of paragraphs. In-depth? For people who never read anything harder than a comic book, maybe.

Woah...

[Rik Sweeney]

Windows Server 2008 takes up 10 GB of hard drive space.

10?! What the hell's taking up all the space?!

Perhaps there's a 1080p movie of Balmer chanting "Developers Developers Developers"

Re:Woah...

[man_of_mr_e]

Both Vista and 2008 suffer from 'backup-itis', use a tool like SpaceMonger on a fresh install of either and you'll see that well over 50% of the used space is copies of system files (sometes 3 or 4 copies). This is all part of the "self-healing" bit, but I think it's a waste of space.

Not surprised

[JK_the_Slacker]

Although our test system used a beefy Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 with generous 2 GB of RAM, the Server's user interface felt sluggish with Windows being drawn very slowly

That's what happens when you try to use beefy hardware with a cheesy interface to a porky OS.

Re:Not surprised

[jollyreaper]

Although our test system used a beefy Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 with generous 2 GB of RAM, the Server's user interface felt sluggish with Windows being drawn very slowly That's what happens when you try to use beefy hardware with a cheesy interface to a porky OS. Wow, I think Jimmy Dean just got a new idea for a breakfast burrito.

did not seem that slow to me

[COMON$]

I have been running server 2008 on an old gaming machine with 1GB ram, a 512MB NVIDIA 6800, 72GB raptor drive, athlon 2200 as well. Been very quick and clean on the interface, customization options are nice. I was just about to slap exchange 2007 on it last night to test drive it and forgot it is 64bit only. But as usual I am dissappointed with the lack of ssh support. I will have to read the article to see what the forest changes are with 2008 as when I promoted the server there was no difference that I could tell between 2003 AD and 2008, but there was a note about 2008 forests being different or something like that.

It does however make me wonder if my graphics card was pushing the speed of the interface, how am I going to justify to my department head that I need the latest gaming card for my server? I have been trying that excuse for years to no avail :)

Double standards?

[mrjb]

Now it is a problem if MS is not bundling software? Last time I checked, that was a good thing. At least it allows excellent third party products such as putty and pscp to thrive.

Understandable.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

It is kind of explainable, given that most MSFT managers grew up in the era where WYSIWYG was the greatest thing since the sliced bread. They have always believed in GUI and never liked CLI much. So the tradition continues, less emphasis on anything script oriented and CLI oriented. Their idea of great script is a vbscript with its own GUI. We might not like it, but that kind of explains part of MSFT's way of working/thinking.

Lacking support for ftp, ssh etc are some vague attempt to create "value" to the non portable skill set developed by the windows admins. If the sys admins develop these skills and could easily run either linux or windows, then the switching cost for corporations to switch from windows to linux will decrease. Since the maximum revenue MSFT can extract from its existing installed base is capped by what it would cost its customers to switch to an alternative system, this is a very rational business strategy to keep them following a straight and narrow road to Redmond. And let us not blame just MSFT for this attitude. It is the customers who should realize the value of reducing their switching costs and demand better support for ftp, ssh and other linux side expertise they have in house. If customers don't demand it, why would a profit centered corporation deliver it?

Re:Understandable.

[RKThoadan]

What's really strange is that the MS PowerShell is actually pretty impressive. It's a lot like most *nix shells except that it passes objects around instead of strings. It feels vaguely similar to Interactive Ruby to me. There are actually tasks in Exchange 2007 that can only be done in the shell (not in the gui) and many tasks are easier in the shell. They've even mimicked most of your standard bash commands. It knows what ls, ps and man are (among others).

It appears to me that MS is quite committed to letting people run gui-less servers now, and their doing a pretty decent job of it so far. They're doing a lot better job of that than they are with Vista.

Server Core

[Major Blud]

I think one thing that needs to remembered is that 2008 will also contain "Server Core", which is essentially Windows without a GUI. I haven't played with 2008 since the early candidates, but I'd bet good money that a lot of the performance issues and disk space usage can be minimized when running in Server Core mode.

Re:Printable View - No ads

[LuckyStarr]

Copy and paste this URL. They've got an REFERRER check in place. Print pages redirect to the original article if they got linked to by an URL on a foreign domain.

But my mum told me to play nice...

[WebCowboy]

...becoause everyone is different and special in their own way!

Historically, Windows hasn't been command line oriented anyway, and remote access is done with Remote Desktop.

Well, historically the rest of the server OS universe HAS bee command-line-oriented and script-heavy, and remote access has been through RSH, Telnet and then SSH when encryption and strong authentication were needed. Nonetheless, int the Linux/BSD/UN*X world there has been a good amount of effort to accommodate the "Windows way". We have VNC, tunneling xwindows over SSH, and yes, there are even clients for Citric and Remote Desktop freely available (and sometimes included as part of an OS distribution).

Things aren't really character stream oriented in Windows, and for security you are supposed to use IPSec.

But Microsoft? Nooooo. Microsoft cannot tolerate differences. It insists we all play the game by their rules and if we don't, they take their marbles and go home. MS doesn't want mixed platform to be easy--they want it to be possible but annoying. The hope is that they can leverage their total desktop dominance to infiltrate the pointy-haired-boss-managed server market enough to hit critical mass, where managers get annoyed at having to maintain two different sets of administration tools, procedures, training resources, etc.

There is no technical reason whatsoever for Microsoft choosing one approach whilst barely acknowledging established practices. It happens quite often where someone bellyaches about "I can't do x in Windows without the GUI" or some such thing and quickly gets a reply from a seasoned Windows admin to just open up a command prompt and type some-such arcane command which is undocumented, or buried deep within the bowels of the MSDN knowledgebase beast. Obviously Windows IS capable, but MS consciously chooses to neglect such practices. SSH is part of the same problem--they could AT LEAST put in a proper SSH-supporting client fer cryin' out loud! A server would be nice too--not everyone wants to dedicate the bandwith for remote desktop connections. There are servers or other machines that require remote admin out in very remote locations sometimes, accessible only by low-speed cellular modems or packet radio. Remote GUIs at 9600 baud tend to be quite impractical compared to ssh, sftp and such. GUIs make a very poor interface for large-scale admin of, say large server farms and clusters.

Microsoft's model might be a "better UNIX than UNIX" within some narrow scope, but Microsoft continues to suffer from severe tunnel vision. It takes them a long time to bring things into focus that aren't right in front of them. Microsoft could've put a more concerted effort into WinFS and Monad and componentised Windows and interoperability tools but it didn't. It had instead to make 3 major releases of .NET and make a sparkly, glassy 3-D GUI and elabourate DRM technology. Meanwhile, the REAL promising technology remain mired in the research department or stumble out barely half-baked.

I'd send MS to the corner for its lousy behaviour.