February 2008 — News

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Windows Server 2008, Vista SP1 Released to Manufacturing

by Keith Ward

Microsoft Monday announced that two of its most important products of the last half-decade are complete and ready to be shipped.

Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista Service Pack 1 were released to manufacturing (RTM), marking a dual milestone in the history of both products. It also means that Windows 2008 will be officially shipping by the "Global Launch Wave" of enterprise products on Feb. 27. Others include Visual Studio 2008, released last year, and SQL Server 2008, which was recently pushed back to Q3.

Windows 2008 marks the first major new release of a Windows Server OS since Windows Server 2003. It's also one of Microsoft's most tested products ever: a Microsoft press release stated that more than two million beta and evaluation versions were obtained.

It's a significantly overhauled OS in a number of ways, most of which involve enhanced enterprise abilities. Some of the major changes include:

  • Windows PowerShell. PowerShell is a command-line scripting environment that allows most functionality in Windows 2008 to be automated.
  • Server Core. Server Core is a stripped-down version of the OS tuned for specific tasks, like Web serving, DNS management or print serving. It has a smaller footprint and better performance than a full-blown version of Windows 2008.
  • Network Access Protection (NAP). NAP is a security environment that protects a network by requiring certain standards to be met before a computer is allowed to join a network; for example, a laptop running Windows XP that isn't patched to a certain level will be rejected by the domain.
  • Hyper-V. Hyper-V is a built-in hypervisor for virtualization. Virtualization is the process of separating software from the underlying hardware. It allows, for example, multiple operating systems to be run on a single physical computer, or multiple copies of a single OS to be run on one computer.

Windows 2008, known throughout much of its development history by the codename "Longhorn", was much delayed, and had a key early feature, the information storage and retrieval technology known as WinFS, ultimately scrapped.

An interesting blog posting the morning of RTM described the mood of the server team just prior to the release. "In the final days leading up to RTM, the tone in the war room meetings was calm, almost too calm because there were minimal bugs to resolve and final testing went very smoothly. We focused on testing of the code changes made in Nov/Dec to make sure nothing regressed. Hundreds of system component teams across the Windows division and Microsoft performed their escrow test passes and signed off. The last important step was to ensure our deployment customers, OEMs, and Microsoft IT were satisfied and had no major issues." The author of the post was anonymous.