Windows Server 2008

[localzuk]

Is that what Manufacuring means in Microsoft world ? Why can't they just use the term RTB (oh wait, that has a different connotation that microsoft might not be all to pleased about )

 

Yep, take a look at this.

 

When they RTM'd Vista that was the same as RTB.

[john]

Well the current status is were on RC1, I know that as I've been part of the MS Closed Beta for months, so thats the latest update.

 

As for the Hyper-V, as has been said there is going to be With and Without Hyper-V releases. So its going to be as fun and complex as Vista is with versions Don't forget there adding to the Small Business Server a Medium Business Server as well now, so we will have Small, Medium, Standard, Enterprise, DataCentre, Universe, Globalsoft and probably some others as well, all in 3 different flavours - 32bit, 64bit and Itanium

 

Confused, you should be

[m25man]

MS Will be showcasing Server 2008 at CeBit 2008 on the 4th March.

Bill will be there and so will I.

 

He will be evangelising the benefits and productivity advantages of the new OS and courting the worlds computer press.

I however will be emptying the contents of the Beer Keller, listening to the Oompah Band, eating pig's trotters and visiting the late night emporiums of ill repute in the Kropke area of Hanover City Center.

 

CeBit runs from Tuesday 4th March to Sunday, and contains 26 Halls each about the size of the Bett Show!

 

Microsoft always like to use one of these world focus expo's to promote a product and the timing of this one appears to be fairly co-ordinated so I would expect to see Server 2008 to be well shrink wrapped and on the way to distribution by then.

[torledo]

Well the current status is were on RC1, I know that as I've been part of the MS Closed Beta for months, so thats the latest update.

 

As for the Hyper-V, as has been said there is going to be With and Without Hyper-V releases. So its going to be as fun and complex as Vista is with versions Don't forget there adding to the Small Business Server a Medium Business Server as well now, so we will have Small, Medium, Standard, Enterprise, DataCentre, Universe, Globalsoft and probably some others as well, all in 3 different flavours - 32bit, 64bit and Itanium

 

Confused, you should be

 

John

 

Are you serious about the Universe and Globalsoft editions ? Or are you just highlighting the stupidity of Microsoft.

 

If they do plan those editions, what on earth are they for ?

 

I can see some of the advantages of the current SBS edition but it's just slightly useful as a cheap way of buying a packaged version of w2k3.

Nothing more

 

Look at all the other server vendors. Apple have OSX server, IBM have AIX 6, Sun have Solaris 10. one edition. Redhat have no more than 3 editions of the server OS and the same goes for HP-UX.

 

Redhat and Apple have server operating systems that are equally as versatile and used as diversely as windows is, if not more so, but do they need umpteen editions ?

 

At the end of the day inspite of all the different incarnations only two editions of Vista and server 2008 are of any interest to us....Vista Business and server 2008 enterprise edition. So in our case the choice is easy.

[localzuk]

We've always used the standard edition of 2k3 here, and at the moment I haven't found a reason to pay the extra bit per license for Enterprise. However, with the increased memory usage that software has and the use of virtualisation I can see us going to Enterprise with 2k8 - but then, that will likely be a year after 2k8 comes out anyway! And I still don't know if we're ever going to upgrade to vista anytime soon.

 

Editions can be found here.

[cookie_monster]

As MS have said they will licence Hyper-v for around $30 i can't see why they're releasing with and without versions it's just rediculous. I have read that the datacenter version can be licenced now rather than having to buy it through a hardware provider which is sort of interesting but they need to cut out a few versions. I think SBS is a great packate though one of the better placed MS products.

 

We generally use 2k3 standard here enterprise isn't worth the extra money unless you need a large terminal or exchange server. I'm hoping to see better hardware support for x64 in the near future as the performance seems far superior to 32bit.

[m25man]

I can see some of the advantages of the current SBS edition but it's just slightly useful as a cheap way of buying a packaged version of w2k3.

 

I beg to differ my learned friend, SBS Rocks, it has near cult status.

It is however the sprat to catch the mackerel.

It gives any small business the chance to operate as if it were a major corporate.

All the usual stuff but with SQL, ISA, Remote access, push email, fax server you just can't knock it.

 

I have installed loads of SBS boxes and they just keep going and going and going.

SBS (Single Box Solution) as it is touted in the community gets more small and startup businesses on the Microsoft wagon than any other product and the all 64bit 2008 version (Cougar) is eagerly awaited by all us SBS fanatics.

 

Still completely useless however, if your business grows beyond 75 users as the only way out is via the "Transition Pack" which lets you buy yourself out of the SBS into a fully paid up server and the required client CALS.

 

Then it works out only marginally cheaper than if you went down the regular route in the first place, but of course you have all of the labour costs of performing the transition on top.

 

As SBS2003 approaches end of life MS and the OEM's are throwing copies of it out to potential end users for nothing or almost nothing!

HP have been doing a 5 user SBS deal with Cash Back offer on the OS if you buy it with a new server.

 

Bring it on! SBS 2008 can't wait! Ker'ching Ker'ching..... now where's that holiday brochure?

[torledo]

We generally use 2k3 standard here enterprise isn't worth the extra money unless you need a large terminal or exchange server.

 

Or unless you need to cluster. That's the EE killer feature, after all with 1 and 2U 2 socket boxes now the dominant server type in the data centre clustering your SQL or Exchange boxes is a great way to get excellent fault tolerance.

 

I knew SBS had a bit of a following, but couldn't understand why thanks for enlightening me m25man, Might have to download a trial of the new 2008 edition to see what all the fuss is about.

[SYNACK]

SBS if fine so long as you install it and leave it. If you dare to try something like move email off onto a differnet server or move your domain onto a newer server which also runs SBS it becomes a hideous undocumented monster that will consume hours of time and probably take years off your life.

 

It is a good product but its integration makes it very delicate and very picky about where it exists.

[m25man]

SBS becomes a hideous undocumented monster that will consume hours of time and probably take years off your life

 

And as if that would worry you!

You have probably added 20 years to yours by living down there!

 

What's a matter with you man can't you sleep!!!

[SYNACK]

@m25man

 

Yea kind of, I got some pretty flexible hours so I was just tidying up some system maintenance stuff before Monday morning, that way I can just take the morning off.

 

This way they don't get any interruption of service and I can sleep in in a big way tomorrow/today

[m25man]

How cool is that, we are doing exactly the same things on the opposite sides of the world at the same time!

 

I love this job!

[GrumbleDook]

Cool? I stayed up late on Thursday to have a 4 way vidconf between Colorado, Melbourne and Maine ... we finished at 2.30am on Friday ... at least next time it will be others staying up late!

[cookie_monster]

Yes that's very true do you run any clusters yourself then?

[SYNACK]

Sweet, it is good to know that I am not alone in my work habits. Back partially at least on topic we have just ordered a license of 2003 enterprise for our new filtering server as it has 8 CPU cores and Standard unhelpfully stops at 4.

[Norphy]

As MS have said they will licence Hyper-v for around $30 i can't see why they're releasing with and without versions it's just rediculous.

 

I suspect that they're releasing it like that to keep the hoardes of lawyers from their doors. If they released something like HyperV bundled with the OS, they're just asking for another antitrust lawsuit from the likes of VMWare. At least if they charge a nominal fee for it, they can say that they're not giving it away.

 

Sweet, it is good to know that I am not alone in my work habits. Back partially at least on topic we have just ordered a license of 2003 enterprise for our new filtering server as it has 8 CPU cores and Standard unhelpfully stops at 4.

 

Microsoft CPU licencing is done per socket, not per core. You can use up to four quad core CPUs in a standard server and you'd still be able to use all 16 cores.

[SYNACK]

Microsoft CPU licencing is done per socket, not per core. You can use up to four quad core CPUs in a standard server and you'd still be able to use all 16 cores.

 

Thanks, thats strangely sensible of them I will cancel that order when I get back into work as for the moment we don't really have the resources to implement clustering.

 

Enterprise does have better certificate management features though such as automatic assignment of user certificates via Group policy. We use the same distribution method for machine certs now which luckily MS decided to include in standard.

[PiqueABoo]

Well the current status is were on RC1, I know that as

 

I know that too because they put RC1 up for public download last week.

 

But there's only so much time in the day for installing/configuring another release (twice each time, because I keep doing a Core as well). Do you know if anything worth looking at has changed since RC0?

[PiqueABoo]

unless you need a large terminal or exchange server

 

Haven't looked too hard at why, but MS say 8GB is about tops for E2K7 which is well within the X64 Standard edn. limit.

 

I know nothing about large TS, but imagine the limiting factor might be the 2GB kernel mode address space. If that is true how far can you push users/memory size before that starts hurting? If that's not true, what's the story?

[SYNACK]

I know nothing about large TS, but imagine the limiting factor might be the 2GB kernel mode address space. If that is true how far can you push users/memory size before that starts hurting? If that's not true, what's the story?

 

Larger implementations are usually handled by VMWare ESX server which runs as the host operating system itself rather than relying on a windows or linux installation to handle memory management and hardware. This mitigates the limits of 32bit memory addressing that you are talking about.

[cookie_monster]

Surely Windows must still think that the kernel has run out of mapped memory it's a limit of 32-bit memory addressing.

[SYNACK]

Surely Windows must still think that the kernel has run out of mapped memory it's a limit of 32-bit memory addressing.

 

It still has an effect on the VMs its just that the with 64bit CPUs ESX server runs 64bit and then allocates memory to each VM. Each individual VM still has the same limitations that it would have on a real machine. For 32bit windows this works out to be about a 3.6GB top out depending on the hardware involved as the HW grabs some of the memory space for DMA.

[cookie_monster]

Ah that's what i thought.

[torledo]

Surely Windows must still think that the kernel has run out of mapped memory it's a limit of 32-bit memory addressing.

 

It still has an effect on the VMs its just that the with 64bit CPUs ESX server runs 64bit and then allocates memory to each VM. Each individual VM still has the same limitations that it would have on a real machine. For 32bit windows this works out to be about a 3.6GB top out depending on the hardware involved as the HW grabs some of the memory space for DMA.

 

so how does using esx server remove the 32bit memory limits of the 32bit guest OS if the same restrictions still apply ?

 

Are you saying that you can allocate the extended memory available to the hypervisor out to many 32bit guests therefore reducing server sprawl

but not actually alter the maximum amount of memory each instance of 32bit windows server can use.

 

This is great for consolidation but presumably things like sql and exchange are still better off on their own box.

 

Not trying to be clever, just trying to understand what esx server changes.

[PiqueABoo]

Larger implementations are usually handled by VMWare ESX server

 

Making them virtual suggests you are, but I'm not entirely sure if you're agreeing with my conjecture i.e. that you'll typically need to scale out to two Standard 4GB TS machines (as opposed to scaling up to one Enterprise 8GB TS machine).