Windows Server 2008, Vista SP1 Released to Manufacturing
Microsoft today 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.
Windows 2008 has been closely tied to its desktop
counterpart, Vista, since the beginning. Vista, released to the public a
little more than a year ago, has had a rocky history. Microsoft is counting
on SP1 to be a turning point in its acceptance by corporations and the
public in general.
The two OSes largely share the same codebase, and
were developed to work tightly together. But Vista has been a sales disappointment<
/a> for Microsoft, despite pronouncements<
/a> of its popularity.
Many complaints had to do with a lack of application
compatibility. A blog posting on the Vista team Website by Mike Nash,
corporate vice-president of Windows Product Management, acknowledged the
problem:
"When we first released Windows Vista last year, there were
lots of customers who had great experiences, but some had issues finding
applications that worked well on Windows Vista; others had problems finding
the right device drivers for some of the hardware devices that they
used."
Vista SP1 will cure a lot of those problems. Additional
upgrades include reliability and performance improvements; increased ease of
deployment; and Kernel Patch Protection Application Programming Interfaces
(APIs), which will make it easier for third-party security developers to
integrate their products with Vista.
Another change unveiled in SP1
relates to local search. In response to a legal
challenge from Google, Microsoft made it easier to find third-party
tools for searching a local desktop. Microsoft's version, called Instant
Search, will now be on a more even footing with offerings from companies
like Google.
Along with those changes, another major reason for
Microsoft to be hopeful about increased adoption of Vista with SP1 relates
to tradition. Normally, a large percentage of companies wait until the first
service pack of a new Microsoft OS before they will consider putting it into
production. There is always a certain amount of wariness about the buginess
of a first release of a product as complex as Vista, and it's assumed,
fairly or not, that the bugs will have mostly been squashed with the first
service pack.
According to a blog posting on
Microsoft's TechNet Website, Windows 2008 will be available for commercial
purchase March 1. Microsoft's Nash listed several different timeframes for
the availability of Vista SP1.
In mid-March, Vista SP1 will be
released to Windows Update and Microsoft's download center. About a month
later, SP1 will start to be pushed out to automatic download customers. Also
sometime in April, versions with languages that weren't supported in with
the Windows Update release in March -- English, French, Spanish, German and
Japanese -- will be RTMed.