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:what about DX10/game performance?

[urbanriot]

I don't see why. Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 first releases were perfectly fine in their own right, pre-SP1.

Do we wait for service pack 2 or 3 nowadays?

Re:So command line now?

[dedazo]

No, not really. Most good admins that manage Windows servers tend to use the Win32 console as much as possible. A great majority of them finally picked up on what WMI can do and actually took advantage of it.

I'd think that if Linux is "lambasted" for being geeky it's because users need to do certain things with it, whereas most Windows users rarely ever open a console window.

The number of things that you need to do with bash on any Linux distro have decidedly decreased in the past few years, so I doubt the label is really applicable anymore. Perhaps the problem is that a lot of the problem-solving advice you can find online for distros like Ubuntu tend to use command line solutions, which is predictable if those solutions are being provided by more knowledgeable people who don't have a problem using the console to begin with.

I played with some of the early betas and Server 2008 is actually quite cool. The fact that most everything is now scriptable (the subset that wasn't before through WMI, at least, or the things that have been simplified) is a life saver, and the switching of server roles is very useful when you want to re-task a box quickly for whatever reason. Hosting companies will probably love it.

I think the important thing about 2008 is that it gives you the option to use a character-based environment, and it gives you a very good one at that (PowerShell). If you feel more comfortable with the GUI tools, they're all still there.

Crazy with command lines

[PIPBoy3000]

They're really pushing the command-line thing for all their products. We got a demo of Exchange 2007 and not everything is configurable from within the GUI. Where it is, it gives you the PowerShell command at the bottom.

The worst part for me is that they're reducing support for a lot of their "old" API and everything has to be rewritten using command line tools. Essentially what I'm doing is making pretty web interfaces for something that should be part of their own product. Madness!

MS-DOS 8.0

[tverbeek]

Windows 1.0 wasn't graphical,

Huh? By what definition of "graphical"? Windows 1.0 wasn't pretty or quite as icon-happy as later versions, but it most certainly had a graphical user interface, complete with a bitmapped pixel-addressible display, an arrow-shaped mouse pointer, tiled windows with little control widgets in the corners, and icons along the bottom of the screen showing you what programs were running (a bit like OS X's dock). Perhaps you have it confused with OS/2 1.0?

I do have to say that I'm amused at the idea of a GUI-less Windows, considering that Windows began as nothing but a GUI, which ran on top of DOS. After all the effort Microsoft went through to make the GUI mandatory and supposedly integral to the OS itself, now they're talking about uncoupling it. MS-DOS 8.0 anyone?