Sneak Peek at Windows Server 2008

stinkymountain writes to tell us that NetworkWorld got their hands on Microsoft's latest addition to the server OS market and had a chance to poke around inside Windows Server 2008. It seems that the new release is a vast improvement over older versions in both security and performance but still lacking in several key areas. "There's even a minimalist installation called Windows Server Core that can run various server roles (such as DNS, DHCP, Active Directory components) but not applications (like SQL Server or IIS dynamic pages). It's otherwise a scripted host system for headless operations. There's no GUI front end to a Windows Server Core box, but it is managed by a command line interface (CLI), scripts, remotely via System Manager or other management applications that support Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), or by Remote Terminal Services. It's also a potential resource-slimmed substrate for Hyper-V and virtualization architectures."

Comments

Re:um yeah

[Jugalator]

Number two being that it most likely still relies on that crap Registry schema for all of its settings. At least it can now navigate and modify the registry like it was a file system, thanks to the (admittedly ridiculously named) Windows PowerShell.

Also, here's a video interview with the Vista kernel team on the topic of the Windows Registry among other things, and why it has remained.

Re:um yeah

[Jugalator]

Btw, the "registry as a file system" (similar to the architecture Linux uses for all sorts of abstract "devices") is a documented API one can write own "providers" for.

Re:Embedded Hardware

[EvilRyry]

I'm not quite sure whether your trying to be funny or not. You do realize that WinCE and NT don't share a whole lot in common, right?

Most people seem to miss...

[man_of_mr_e]

Most people seem to miss the fact that it's not JUST a CLI, there are also a whole boatload of client GUI utilities that go with it, that you run on your workstation to manage the server. That's something that Linux has been largely missing (not counting stuff like Webmin, which isn't quite the same thing or remote X)

For example, for a Server Core Active Directory Role, you can administer it from the standard AD Users and Computers applet from any client.

Re:what about DX10/game performance?

[ld a,b]

Amen, if Microsoft would just release a Server Lite(Windows 2000 Pro) version of their Server systems(NT, 2000, 2003, 2008) instead of the mainstream(95, 98, XP, Vista) crap, nobody with a right mind would be using Linux on their desktops. Did you notice how MS doesn't include their theme bullshit in their Server OSes? GTK, QT, X, Compiz? Sorry, but I don't think their codebases can stand a chance against the Windows GUI. Sure you can lookalike, but for x features you have 2^x size and bugs.
I like free, but if I can have better, I'm not gonna die for my ideals.

GUI-est CLI Ever

[LlamaDragon]

I've been playing with this at work, and for a "trimmed down CLI" version of the OS I find it telling that it uses just 60 mb of memory after booting than the GUI version and it still requires some 3.5 gb of hard drive space (this isn't precise, I'm not at work right now). And the weirdest thing about it is that it's not just command line. It actually loads, to a point, the windows GUI. There's no explorer, but the command line box it gives you is a window. You can move it with the mouse. You can open notepad, and it opens in a window. Regedit is still there. Just to see if I could, I installed Firefox. They leave out a few handy odds and ends like Explorer.exe so you don't get your usual file manager, but if they're serious about going with a real command line, this ain't it.

Maybe it does have it's place. If you just want to run basic DNS or some of the 10 or so other things it's intended to do, then at least it's going to do that for you with slightly less memory/space requirements and without quite so much other stuff running that leaves it so open to other vulnerabilities. But I still find it kind of silly, a good Sys. Admin can lock down the regular GUI version just fine and resource savings are so minimal as to be nonexistent.

But that's just my couple of cents...

Re:It has to either be 40% faster or exploit HW

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Server 2008 will ship with server mode virtualization and the hypervisor in beta. However, it has supported real-time backup (with volume shadow copies) and per-file encryption, and up to 2TB of RAM (64GB on 32-bit) since at least 2003. Now it has whole-volume encryption too (per-file encryption means the guy backing up your files can't read them; whole-volume encryption means the guy who steals your HD can't read it).

Windows NT has had a journalled filesystem that could span physical volumes since it shipped in 1993. It got transactional capabilities with Vista. Now it has online chkdsk. Can your filesystem fix corruption while it's mounted read-write?

dom

Re:It has to either be 40% faster or exploit HW

[Johnno74]

Windows 2003 already does most of what you said.

per process and per CPU throttling

you have a point there, it would be nice...

It has to run real time back up

see volume shadow copy

support dedicated inline encryption

See encrypting file system, or bitlocker.

security subsystems.

Not sure exactly what you mean, but windows has got a pretty good fine-grained sercurity system. The main problem is out of the box it is largely turned off, and by default users are administrators.

It has to support 16x more RAM

Really? 2TB isn't enough for you?

and an order of magnitude larger AD spaces.

Hmm I had never heard anyone complaining about any AD limits before so I did a quick search to find out what they were. I didn't find much, but I did see apparently korea.com has an AD implementation with 8 million accounts.

It has to support virtualized patches

Yep, you are right, that would be nice.

a journalled file system

See NTFS. Its only been around for 10+ years,

a file system that spans physical volumes.

See DFS.

Re:It has to either be 40% faster or exploit HW

[mr_majestyk]

>> per process and per CPU throttling
> you have a point there, it would be nice...

this became available in Windows Server 2003: Windows System Resource Manager

Re:MS-DOS 8.0

[guruevi]

If you mean by 'graphical', binary colors (black and white or black and green or black and orange or if you were really rich, EGA card with 16 colors) 640k limit, no program groups, no multitasking, non-overlapping windows while competing products had 256 or more colors, overlapping windows and *gasp* hardware acceleration.

Here is a funny video of Steve Ballmer commercializing Windows (back when it was only $99): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGvHNNOLnCk