- Posted by ploft on November 4, 2008
Windows Server 2008 R2 Overview
The next version of Windows Server is the R2 of Windows 2008, internally called Windows 7 Server. For now Microsoft expect shipping R2 Q1 of 2010. Some of the new features worth mentioning:
- New active directory level (a lot of changes and improvement since the 2003 that didn’t bring that much to the table – the 2008 R2 does, with Recycle Bin functionality a much richer interface for administrating active directories in larger enterprises.)
- PowerShell v2.0
- Second release of the Hyper-V engine, now real supporting multimonitor RDP’s, and live migration from server to server without any downtime or impact on the guest system.
- Along with Hyper-V, Microsoft had made a lot of effort into making RemoteApp better at supporting video/audio, 2D/3D graphics, and the overall view of software running remotely, making the remote experience a lot more transparent for the users.
- Branch Office caching feature, lowering the traffic between office branches by providing a usage-aware kind-of-proxy.
- Core editions now support the .NET framework (apparently not the complete framework, but the most of it)
- Easier administrating web-application leveraging most of the administration to the IIS-manager, and also allowing you to control SQL databases directly from the manager.
- Support for 64 physical cores (that’s 256 logical cores for a single operating system instance)
Windows 2008 Server R2 offers a lot on the connectivity part, aiming at trouble-free connectivity nevertheless our location, by using Direct Access without the usage of VPN’s.
It’s also worth mentioning the 2008 Server was the last server system from Microsoft shipped with 32bit support. The Windows 2008 R2 Server is only shipped in a 64 bit version.