Windows “Workstation” 2008: One week later

It’s been just over a week since I took the plunge and nuked my Vista SP1 installation in favor of a desktop implementation of Windows Server 2008 (aka Windows “Workstation” 2008). So far, it’s been a smooth ride. All of my core applications are working flawlessly, including SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2008 and Office 2007. In fact, outside of the multimedia issues I mentioned in my previous entry, I’d be hard pressed to find fault with the experience.

Some observations:

1. Visual Studio 2008 flies on “Workstation” 2008. This is no joke. I was ready to throw in the towel on Studio 2008 under Vista. Now, time-consuming operations — like selecting a complex ASP.Net object on a heavily populated Web form — that would bog down under Vista just snap right along under 2008. The IDE loads faster, as do my projects. As far as Studio 2008 is concerned, “Workstation” 2008 has delivered an all-around speed boost and has proven to be a real productivity enhancer.

2. VMware Workstation also runs better on 2008. I’m a big VM user because I need to test my code against so many different OS permutations. With “Workstation” 2008, juggling even large, multi-gigabyte VMs is a breeze. You immediately sense the performance improvement as even hard-to-virtualize OSes, like Vista x64, run more smoothly. It’s made the process of testing my latest revisions that much more pleasant.

3. The OS never feels “sluggish.” Under Vista, you inevitably reach a point where the OS starts to “slow down.” It may be after a day of heavy use or even a week of on-again/off-again (or in the case of my Dell XPS M1710 “notebrick,” suspend-again) computing. But eventually you’ll feel the need to reboot and start clean. With “Workstation” 2008, I’ve yet to encounter such a malaise. Whether it’s better memory management or simply a more mature, polished code base, “Workstation” 2008 delivers a level of robustness and consistency that Vista can’t touch.

Of course, the really bizarre aspect to my “Workstation” 2008 experience is that, from a technical standpoint, it doesn’t make sense – or at least, it shouldn’t. With the same kernel (as of Vista SP1), the OSes should in fact behave similarly.

To be sure, the Windows Server 2008 kernel is configured differently at boot-up. Different switches are applied to tune the kernel for server duty. In fact, this was the norm with all “NT” client and server releases prior to Windows XP: A shared code base differentiated primarily by boot-time tuning of the kernel image. However, it’s hard to fathom how tuning alone could cause what is essentially the same OS to behave so differently in identical workload scenarios.

Something else is going on here – or perhaps isn’t going on. Some of my “Workstation” 2008 compatriots have speculated that DRM is to blame, that Windows Server 2008 boots with less of the DRM plumbing than the consumer-oriented Vista and that this, in turn, frees up cycles for more important tasks (like the applications you’re running to actually get some work done).

Whatever the cause, I will continue to dig into the differences between the Vista and “Workstation” 2008 runtime environments. In particular, I’ll be looking for evidence of OS layers that might be missing from the overall “Workstation” 2008 stack, layers that might be the source of the up to 17 percent performance hit that tests show Vista’s particular flavor of the “NT 6.0.6001” kernel introduces.

I’d also like to hear what other users are finding as they experiment with Windows “Workstation” 2008. Let’s get the dialog going and see if the initial hype stands up to some old fashioned scrutiny. Fire away!