Microsoft offers first RC of Windows Server 2008

The long march to the release of Windows Server 2008, aka Longhorn Server, continued on Monday, as Microsoft announced that it is making the first Release Candidate version of the upcoming operating system available for public download.

Microsoft said that RC0, as it’s being called by the software vendor, will become available on its Web site within the next 24 hours — replacing the Beta 3 release that it has been offering to early users.

RC0 is the first pre-release version to include a built-in virtualization hypervisor, which is code named Viridian. But Ward Ralston, senior technical product manager for Microsoft’s Windows Server group, noted that the hypervisor component “is not yet in beta” and is thus less mature than the rest of Windows Server 2008.

Microsoft declared as long ago as April that the OS itself was basically “feature-complete.” In contrast, the hypervisor, which will compete with technology from server virtualization market leader VMware, will still be in Community Technology Preview form when Windows Server 2008 ships in next year’s first quarter, Ralston said. A finished version of the hypervisor will be ready within six months of the operating system’s release, he added.

IT managers who have been testing earlier versions of Windows Server 2008 as part of Microsoft’s Technology Adoption Program say they’re largely impressed with the OS, though not without some reservations.

Robbie Roberts, IT manager at Windrush Frozen Foods, an Oxford, England-based fine foods importer, has been using Windows Server 2008 in live applications for the past two months to run his company’s rights management services and its print servers as well as a portal based on Microsoft’s SharePoint Server 2007 software.

With just a two-person IT team that oversees 25 Windows servers, Roberts considers automation and ease of use to be his highest priorities. Windows Server 2008 is delivering on both those counts, he said.

“The worst thing they could have done is totally redesign the [operating system] so that there would be a huge learning curve,” Roberts said. Instead, “the user interface is cleaner while keeping it as similar as they could.”

Small things, such as the ability to reduce the number of Windrush’s domain controllers through the use of Windows Server 2008, also are helping to boost the performance of the company’s servers, Roberts said.

He added that bugs haven’t been an issue with the software. “We were involved in the Windows Server 2003 rollout, and we had tons of problems,” he said. “We absolutely expected tons of problems with Windows Server 2008. But — hand on heart — we’ve had none. We found running Vista more difficult than Windows Server 2008.”

The main problem Roberts did encounter was in getting SharePoint, in particular its Excel Services feature, to run properly with the new operating system. But that turned out to be due to a problem with SharePoint, he said.

Windrush currently uses VMware’s virtualization software, and that product’s “features and performance are great,” Roberts said. “But I’m a GUI type person, so I don’t like using the command line in Linux.” He plans to try testing Microsoft’s Windows Server Virtualization hypervisor as soon as he can.

Roberts also plans to move the rest of his Microsoft applications onto Windows Server 2008 as soon as possible, except for Office Communications Server, which he said is not yet supported by the operating system.

Longhorn beta testing feedback The government of Georgia’s Fulton County, where Atlanta is located, has been testing Windows Server 2008 for almost three years. Before installing the operating system, the county’s biggest need was tighter security, according to Keith Dickie, its assistant director of IT. For instance, he said that the county’s libraries are under constant attack from hackers via the Internet as well as the public access terminals located inside library branches.

“With Windows Server 2003, it’s hard to figure out what ports need to be open or closed,” Dickie said. By comparison, Windows Server 2008 has made it easier for county IT staffers to lock down unused ports and manage network firewalls with domain controllers. Workers have even been able to make the domain controllers read-only, so “if somebody hacks that box, they can’t take it over,” Dickie said. Overall, he added, “we’re able to reduce the surface area of attack.”

Similarly, Microsoft’s NAP (Network Access Protection) technology, a new feature in Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista, is enabling Fulton County to block insecure servers and client systems — think teleworkers whose systems haven’t been properly updated — from accessing its network.

“We tried to do this with Active Directory and domain policies. But now we can really enforce what used to be just a paper policy,” said James Tabor, the county’s network administrator.

NAP also will become available in the Service Pack 3 release of Windows XP, which is due in the first quarter of next year. That will let Fulton County “buy more time” before upgrading PCs from Windows XP to Vista, Tabor said.

The main detriment to Windows Server 2008 cited by Fulton County officials is a lack of support for the operating system by key third-party applications. For instance, the county’s VoIP and unified messaging systems rely on Cisco’s CallManager 4.1 software, which the county bought a little over six months ago. But CallManager 4.1 runs only on Windows 2000 Server, according to Jay Terrell, Fulton County’s deputy director of IT.

Also, the country has had to run Internet Information Services 7.0 in Windows Server 2003 compatibility mode on systems running Windows Server 2008 in order to get some Web applications to work properly.

As a result, the county doesn’t expect to move most of its third-party applications to Windows Server 2008 until a year from now, Terrell said. “We’re not rushing to put anything into production that would hurt our users,” he noted.

In contrast, Quixtar, which sells health and beauty products online through a network of independent business owners, is running Windows Server 2008 in production mode with Active Directory and on Web servers that are based on IIS 7.0 — although in the latter case, it is using the Windows Server 2003 compatibility mode like Fulton County.

Matt Behrens, supervisor for IT infrastructure at Grand Rapids, Mich.-based Quixtar, said that with Active Directory, the biggest improvement has been in the time it takes to replicate the database. “What used to take five to six days now takes four to five hours,” Behrens said.

The operating system’s password policies also have been improved, according to Behrens. He said that with Windows Server 2008, he can require that workers with administrator-level access to systems create much more difficult-to-crack passwords than lower-level users must have.

As for IIS 7.0, Steve Cole, who heads Quixtar’s Web operations, said that once the company got past some bugs in the Web server software in the first two beta releases of the OS, it hasn’t had any further application compatibility issues. He added, though, that his staff has “had to do a fair amount of reconfiguration as it’s a completely new architecture.”

Cole likes new administration features in IIS 7.0. “It’s doing things that we’d been wishing for for years,” he said. But for now, raw performance on returning requested information to end-users is only about as good as Quixtar was seeing with IIS 6.0. “Our goal is to see this get at least 15 percent better, and at least 20 percent better in terms of (processing) capacity,” Cole said. “Microsoft knows that’s on the top of our list.”

Microsoft also said that an RC0 version of its Windows Media Services 2008 software is being made available for download, as well as a Community Technology Preview release of the IIS 7.0 Media Pack.