Microsoft will release Windows 2008 Server as the direct successor to Windows 2003 Server in the spring of next year. The new server OS, code named Longhorn, shares the same kernel with Windows Vista and incorporates many additions compared to its predecessor.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/1 [...] index.html

There is an error in the article about Windows Server Virtualization. WSV is NOT based on Virtual Server. WSV is a completely different architecture.

Virtual Server runs on top of Windows Server. The Windows Server Virualization Hypervisor runs below the OS in CPU ring -1.

I have worked quite a bit with Windows Server 2003 and I know that the graphics drivers are not installed automatically, and consequently the UI is almost unusable. I have manually installed graphics drivers for Windows XP on Server 2003 and the UI is no longer sluggish. I would assume the same is true for Windows Server 2008. I would speculate that installing the Vista graphics driver on the Server 2008 machine would eliminate this problem.

good article.

Im curious to know how the virtuilzation technology compares to other virtulization products out there.

And also the cost of this thing. standard $500-ish server software? or will it be worse?

Regarding sluggish graphics. I took a shot at running the AMD's Vista installer for Catalyst 7.10 and it flawlessly installed the fully functional driver and control panel.

All in all, the Server 2008 experience relative to Server 2003 is everything the Vista experience relative to XP SHOULD have been. Namely, improvements far outnumber arbitrary and unnecessary changes. It is a relief to see "+" and "-" for expand/collapse treeview instead of the ridiculous and hard to hit symbols in Vista.

Still though, network shares from XP systems refuse to get gigabit speed which is my dealbreaker for using Vista.

IIS 7 FTP (with SSL support) is being released separately from RC0 code.
http://www.iis.net/downloads/defau [...] g=6&i=1526 via http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=3

Slow UI redraw is likely due to the acceleration being disabled on the video card. Go into display settings, Advanced, Troubleshooting tab, and enable accelerations. Further, the problem should not be noticeable if connecting over RDP to administer the server.

I run all my servers headless anyway - so who cares what video drivers are installed.

Does anyone know if MS got around to fixing the Terminal Server Licensing in 2008?

In 2000 you had to license TS CALs "Per Client PC" so if 1 power user had 4 machines, you had to pay for each of them. The counterpoint to that was 2000 Pro and XP Pro got "free" licenses when they were issued a license.

In 2003 they added a Per User licensing mode for TS CALs, but apparently someone dropped the ball and they never finished the code. So if you set your TS Servers to Per User licensing mode and you had a 2003 TS CAL Server that was just Activated (Seperate from OS Activation) then all your TS Servers would let people in all day long and never use a single license. Whole big enough to drive a truck through in my opinion, but neither SP1 nor SP2 (Havent confirmed the SP2 one myself) never bothered to fix this.

So I am curious:
Does 2008 have Per User TS Licensing mode?
Does it actually work and issue CALs or is it broken like 2003?

Thanks!

pretty good round up...but yeah i agree, there was no mention of TS, there is a lot of new stuff with TS: application publishing through MSI or RDP files as well as a web interface, much like Citrix, the new TS Gateway which uses NAP (Network Access Protection which should have also been mentioned)

there is also a load balancer for TS, you can define a percentage of the load on each server in your farm, ex. 25%, and session directory is still there, much improved, now called session broker which can be used with an NLB solution or DNS round-robin

just like the windows virtualization feature, in RC0 the users can also install the windows streaming media server role, this is available as a packaged download from microsoft.com

regarding vmware vs. ms wvs, i would like to see a standoff between the two as well, once of course wvs is completed, because right now it's only a preview release, however this of course needs to be tested on a server that has the v-chip in order for hypervisor to fully work, and it's worth to mention that wvs can only be installed on x64 platform servers with x64 o/s, not 32bit, allowing both x64 and x86 guest o/s installs

regarding the licensing comment, you should read up on it on their website i guess...there are a lot of docs for rc0 on ms.com, i'm just not aware of the licensing stuff though

also, the mention of the GUI being just like Vista, RC0 actually no longer has the sidebar on it, it used to be there in beta 3, but no longer available...

There is a tiny mistake in the article. You don't need to enter the product key before Server2008 starts copying your files to the hard drive.