Microsoft gives glimpse of Windows Server 8 Microsoft has given a peek into Windows 8 Server, the successor to Windows Server 2008 R2 and companion to the tablet-tastic Windows 8 client. The company is reported Tuesday to have boasted Windows 8 Server will pack more than 100 new features. Speaking at its Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), however, Microsoft seems to …
A lot of people complain heavily about Windows Vista yet when it comes to server 2008 (which, ironically enough, is build on Vista) its suddenly "perfect" and "an awesome OS". Maybe I'm just dumb, but I don't quite get it.
My servers still use 2k3 which does an excellent task. But this does look interesting if you look past the obvious marketing and sales nonsense...
Server 2008 is certainly better than Vista, but still has a lot of its core problems. Notably, a lot of established server tools and utilities don't work on it or are only partly functional, and you spend (correction, waste) a lot of time finding workarounds for things which are quick to implement on S2003.
If it has one saving grace it's Hyper-V, which is much faster than the earlier MS virtualization offerings.
In my experience whilst it's not always true of the client OS the server OS improves with every version.
2008 R2 is "built-on" windows 7, but in any case Windows 2008 was still a lot better than vista.
Native VM guest replication would be very useful indeed for hot backups without third party software.
I work for a large building society and we are looking very closely at moving from VMware to HyperV. The hypervisor is now a commodity item, is doesnt really matter whether you use HyperV, ESXI or Xen. The real benefits come from the management wrap that vCenter and Microsoft System Centre tools provide. For a company that has already invested in SCCM / SCOM and other microsoft tools, their are significant savings to be made by moving from the very costly VMware products (and I don't see this getting cheaper with recent vSphere 5 announcements) to a full Microsoft virtualisation stack. Not to mention that System Centre Virtual Machine Manager can manage ESX hosts as well as Hyper V hosts during your intial swing / migration period :)
To manage vSphere with SCVMM you need vCenter. Also, it's also a bit limited when it comes to maintenance and config tasks, so you still end up using vCenter.
Hyper-V might be 'free', but they sting you on management tools (System Center needs more servers, and horsepower to meet only a percentage of what vCenter does in one app). Hyper-V memory management and networking are way behind vSphere. While the hypervisor might be viewed as a commodity, as with all comodities, you should always get the best suited to your needs. More often than not, he who buys cheap really does buy twice.
I, for one, welcome our new Windows Server overlords.
Near-term I think Hyper-V will be making significant inroads, especially for running Windows workloads.
The new pricing structure of vSphere 5 means it's cheaper for me to buy Enterprise Plus licensing due to vRAM limitations (my servers have 96GB RAM, so 2 E+ licenses instead of 3) than it is to buy Enterprise.
Or, I could just buy copies of W2k8 R2 Datacenter and run unlimited instances of Windows guests on my cluster for $496 less per processor.
Considering I've got 60 virtualized guests, 50 running Windows Server, that's a pretty significant cost savings.
Great Announcements!
It would be nice though - for Microsoft customers - if, for once their rhetoric comes closer to the reality of failed and under performing technology releases that the company has consistently put out over the past decades.
There is nothing like flashy propaganda, particularly if clients suffer from Attention Deficit Syndrome (ADS) - as many Microsoft customers apparently do - and have no idea that what they bought into is not what they are getting, or even reasonably comparable to competitive solutions from other vendors.
As I recall Windows Server 2008 gold release came already patched up to SP1. Add in the fact that the application estate on a client OS is usually more complex than on a server and that might explain the better reputation Windows Server 2008 had over Vista.
I ran Windows Server 2008 for a while on my laptop. Worked great for me.
No experience of Vista, I stuck with XP until Win 7 came out.
Warning sign because most of the the above is just an opinion....
Like a few other people here I find the differences between Windows Server 2003 and 2008 very similar to XP/Vista.
2008 runs much slower on hardware that runs 2003 perfectly well.
2008 tries to be nice - in a folder where you sort things by the filename: when adding a new file it appears in the correct place instead of at the end of the list. Nice. But after another file is added the "sort" column indicator mysteriously disappears, the new file goes at the end of the list and other items seem to appear in the order that they were added to the folder instead of alphabetically. Not so nice.
And dont get me started on the server management - they have totally ruined a very useful utility - all items now in one window so you lose loads of screen estate, and boy is it slow. Looking at the list of logged in users and it will start to flash like mad, sometimes it does it for 2 or 3 minutes, ignoring keys/button presses ffor the duration! Ridiculous - it does the same thing on all of our Win2008 servers, and on NONE of our Win2003 servers.
And I think there are 10 times as many events continually being logged, it makes the event viewer totally useless for trying to find that one useful piece of information you need.
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