Windows Server Division WebLog

Hi all – I’m David Hastie, senior product manager in the Identity and Security Business Group here at Microsoft. I wanted to flag an announcement Microsoft made today in the area of information protection and data loss prevention. It involves Rights Management Read More...

Hi, Manlio Vecchiet here. I'm director of product management on the Windows Server marketing team, focused on Windows Server networking, terminal services and VDI. I'm in Barcelona right now attending Microsoft TechEd EMEA conference. Whether you are one of the many IT Pros that have successfully deployed Terminal Services over the past decade, or whether your company is considering virtualization technologies to implement a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), or even if you are new to the concept of a centralized, remote desktop - this will matter to you. Today we are introducing Windows Server 2008 Remote Desktop Services – the next generation of server tools and platform that allow you to accelerate and extend centralized desktop and application deployments to any device. So, what exactly is ‘Remote Desktop Services’? Read More...

Microsoft’s Network Access Protection (NAP) solution was cited as a leader (the top category) in a recent independent report, “The Forrester Wave: Network Access Control, Q3 2008.” Microsoft was one of the many network access control (NAC) vendors invited Read More...

The team behind Windows Essential Business Server 2008 for midsized companies (part of the newly announced Windows Essential Server Solutions family and formerly known as "Centro") has launched a team blog here . Group Program Manager Eric Watson provides Read More...

In the course of talking to many Microsoft partners and customers, the Windows Small Business Server team has learned that there are sometimes misperceptions about the product, in many cases based on experiences with the earlier versions of SBS. In hopes Read More...

back to Redmond late yesterday from Reno where I was attending Supercomputing 2007 conference. I suspect SC07 will be best remembered for the power outage that hit the convention center and most of downtown Reno, and Ashlee's stellar headline. While I was in Reno, there were lots of colleagues in Barcelona making all kinds of announcements, from Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V to System Center, at Microsoft's IT Forum. I'm told there were 50+ journalists at a panel session on virtualization, and from the looks of all the news this week, IT reporters either attended Oracle Openworld or IT Forum (except the aforementioned Ashlee Vance). One Microsoft news item that went overlooked, despite the news of Oracle VM hypervisor, Sun xVM hypervisor, VMware Server 2.0 beta and Hyper-V (did I miss one?), was the Server Virtualization Validation Program. You can read a bit about it in this news release, read comments non-MS people here and Alessandro's post. So what is this program? Customers who have valid Windows Server licenses or support agreements can call for support to either Microsoft or the vendor that has provided them the validated server virtualization solution. Whichever company is contacted first will try to resolve the customer's issue, and in the absence of a solution will, via TSAnet, pass on the information to the other company to help solve the problem. For those of you who know WHQL [Windows Hardware Quality Lab], think of it as WHQL but for server virtualization software. The program will be open to any vendor who creates/sells/services server virtualization software can test and validate that Windows Server 2008/2003/2000 runs as expected as a guest OS. Along with this validation comes mutual technical support for the Windows Server OS running in the non-Microsoft VM. Given this week's news by Sun and Oracle, this program just became a bit more important to customers. [more] Read More...

For those of you interested in parallel computing and high performance computing, you'll take note that today we released the first public beta of V2 of Windows Server 2008 for HPC clusters. The V2 product is called Windows HPC Server 2008. The product currently in the market is called Windows Computer Cluster Server 2003 (or Windows CCS). I'm told the product has been renamed to reflect an expanded feature set beyond compute for very scalable enterprise clusters. Some of those features include high-speed networking, support for clustered file system (e.g., IBM's GPFS, HP Polyserve, Panasas), new failover capabilities, enhanced management tools and a service-oriented architecture job scheduler. Windows HPC Server 2008 will be available in the 2nd half of 2008. In the booth at Supercomputing 2007, we’re running a couple demos with mixed clusters (Linux and Windows). This is a first for Microsoft at a conference, and from what I’m told is link directly to customer input from research, academia, life sciences industries. Here’s an excerpt from today’s news release: Mixed, dual-boot clusters can also improve cluster efficiency. Because dual-boot clusters flexibly serve both Linux and Windows users, they increase utilization rates by expanding their number of addressable users. Examples of customers deploying large mixed clusters include the University of Iowa, Cambridge University, 3M and Baker Hughes Inc. Leading technology partners that have announced mixed cluster support for Windows HPC Server 2008 include Altair Engineering Inc., Cluster Resources Inc. and Platform Computing. One demo station, titled “Virtualization for Mixed Clusters” assumes the customers isn’t running MPI, and has SLES running as a child partition on Hyper-V with Windows HPC Server 2008 parent partition. I’m told that this scenario is coming when customers want to optimize for manageability and cluster utilization and not necessarily peak performance. The second demo station, titled “Linux and Windows: Mixed Cluster Management” assumes a dual-boot cluster (running SLES), storage from Panasas and management tools from Moab. I was told that this scenario could use Hyper-V. A gentleman from Moab explained that customers are seeing more demand for Windows-based apps running on HPC clusters, but the primary HPC environment is Linux. Moab’s tools let customers provision either OS with the chosen app – on an as needed basis. Very cool. Last item to point out is the new Top500 supercomputer list. For those of you not familiar with this bi-annual benchmark, the Top500 list represents the 500 most powerful computers in the world. We’re talking trillions of computations per second. And for the first time ever, there were six Windows-based clusters on the list. While this seriously pales in comparison to the 426 Linux-based clusters, it’s certainly a start. The most powerful Windows-based cluster is owned by Microsoft in our Rainier (Washington) datacenter, and measured in at 11.7 teraflops. And by upgrading this cluster to Windows HPC Server 2008 (same hardware, new OS), I’m told the Linpack benchmark results improved 30%, and more importantly, ran the test in 2 hours. To follow news from the Supercomputing 2007 conference, visit http://insideHPC.com or www.winhpc.org. Patrick Read More...

Today we announced Windows Essential Business Server as the official name for Windows Server codename "Centro," our upcoming IT solution designed for mid-sized organizations. We unveiled details about the product, available here , as well as an initial Read More...

We’ve just launched a major upgrade to http://www.innovateonwindowsserver.com/ , which is an application readiness portal targeting developers of custom and commercial software that also empowers IT Pros to determine application compatibility on Windows Read More...

Hi, my name is Brad Anderson and I’m the General Manager, leading product development and engineering for Microsoft’s Management and Solutions Division. Many of you have heard that I recently assumed leadership for MSD after Kirill Tatarinov moved over Read More...

The usual news items are coing from Orlando's TechEd 2007 location. One of the biggies yesterday was IIS7 - the new web server in Windows Server 2008 - will be added to the list of roles in the Server Core installation of the OS. Volker blogged about it, and see the Q&A; here. This is a recent addition to the Server Core installation - supposedly lots of requests from web hosters and other customers to add it. Perhaps the same folks will request that .NET Framework be supported in the Server Core installation. We shall see. But for the next update of Beta 3, IIS7 and Server Core installation will allow you to host non-ASP.NET web sites and applications, with minimal services and components installed. And don't forget, there's open enrollment in the IIS7 go-live license program being offered with beta 3. Separately today, I was published in an article talking about partner adoption of some of the technologies in Windows Server 2008, namely Powershell, Terminal Services and IIS7. Thanks to Quest Software, Citrix and Monish at HostMySite.com for taking time to add their thoughts. In the same article, my colleague Steve Bell announced the new logo program for Windows Server 2008. Here's the skinny on it: Read More...

Jeffrey has a good, lengthy post about PowerShell here. Of note is the fact that there's been 1 million downloads in 6 months. His post includes references and links to MS products and partner using PowerShell, books, and community sites. PowerShell is the new command-line shell with tools and a scripting language. See more here. Read More...

As Patrick mentioned, many of the Windows Server team are here in Barcelona for TechEd: IT Forum this week and we're gearing up for a great set of breakout sessions, lightning demos, hands-on lab and chalk-talks around Windows Server "Longhorn" and Virtualization. Read More...