Integration with SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008, combined with support for Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0, is likely to prove the initial driver for firms migrating to Windows Server 2008. Experts say the operating system (OS) represents little more than a routine, if overdue, upgrade.

Microsoft made release candidate 1 (RC1) of Windows Server 2008 available for download from its web site ­ link below ­ on 5 December. RC1 is the blueprint for the full commercial release and the last opportunity third-party developers will have to point out bugs in the code.

“As we progress towards the final release candidate, RC1 indicates to the public that we feel the code is ready to be evaluated,” said Microsoft’s senior technical product manager in the Windows Server division, Ward Ralston.

The full release to manufacturing (RTM) of Windows Server 2008 will take place on 27 February 2008, alongside Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 ­ a day Microsoft has called “the largest enterprise launch in our history”.

Neil Macehiter of IT consultancy Macehiter Ward-Dutton suggested many enterprise customers may be more interested trying the new versions of SQL Server and Visual Studio than the server OS.

“Windows Server 2008 on its own might give some incremental value from an administrative perspective, but you have to counterbalance that against the risks of moving mission-critical platforms, which is why Microsoft is making this part of a broader proposition application stack,” Macehiter said.

Gartner analyst Phil Dawson agreed, adding that the most exciting element of the new OS is not the new features and functions, but the focus of the packaging, with different versions optimised for role-based servers that will allow more tuning, customisation and workload management.

“The business case for putting Windows Server 2008 into production will be less dependent on Windows and more on SQL Server, Exchange and SharePoint. The biggest thing is IIS 7.0, which will give a core function change, and Hyper-V virtualisation, but that will not be out until six months later [after the RTM release],” said Dawson.

Dawson and Macehiter urged enterprise IT managers interested in migrating from Windows 2003 to not only evaluate RC1 themselves, but also to seek assurances from independent software vendors (ISVs) that they will test their applications against RC1 to ensure compatibility with the final release of Windows Server 2008.
Many companies prefer to wait until the first service pack appears before migrating to any new OS, given that new releases are often plagued by minor bugs and lack extensive driver support. However, Ralston believes that, because Windows Server 2008 shares so much code with the Vista desktop operating system, it will be stable from the start.

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) will be released around the same time as Windows Server 2008 RTM, and all the Vista SP1 patches will be incorporated into the new server OS as standard.

“Since the NT 4.0 days, people have preferred to wait until the SP1 product appears, but because Windows Server 2008 and Vista share some commonalities in the code base, and Vista SP1 will be coming out as well, really the first service pack for Windows Server 2008 will be SP2 rather than SP1,” Ralston said.

Nevertheless, Macehiter does not expect many companies outside the Microsoft partner community to jump from Windows Server 2003 immediately. “Windows server 2003 is a solid platform and customers will have to ask themselves what is going to force the move. I think you will see a trickle of migrations, particularly as with Windows Server we are talking about mission-critical environments. It is the policy of these sorts of environments just not to do things quickly,” he said.

Windows Server 2008 RC1 boasts a number of features not seen in earlier beta versions of the OS, including Group Policy Preferences. This is designed to save administrators time by eliminating the need for single logons, startup scripts, drive mappings and copying registry settings to other computers.

“Group policy is effective at controlling server and client from a policy perspective, in as much as anything on the desktop or server can be controlled, but there were always a few things that were lacking, like the ability to set internet settings, control panel preferences, drive mappings, or printer or network shares. Group Policy Preferences addresses those inequities,” explained Ralston.

The end user perspective

Mark Ridley, director of IT at recruitment firm reed.co.uk, delivers his verdict on the new OS.

"We have been through every version of Windows Server 2008, starting with beta 3 and going live with RC0 in our web server farm on 18 November. Now we are testing RC1 as well. The big driver for us was moving to Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0, which ships with Windows Server 2008 and is not currently supported in the previous version of the OS.

From our experience with Windows Server 2008 RC0, there are a few gotchas with the OS; things that we had to relearn, like the fact that the IIS stream has divorced itself from the mail server. Sending emails to job candidates is a big part of what we do, and reply notifications are generated on the fly. We have tended to use the inbuilt SMP server for that, but I cannot say whether it is improved in Windows Server 2008 or not. Consequently, this is still being handled by IIS 6.0.

We’ve installed Windows Server 2008 on three web servers, supporting roughly one million unique visitors every month. These servers were the best candidates for migration because they support pretty traditional web- and file-type environments. We are naturally a bit more cautious about moving our backend SQL boxes over, but we’ll certainly look at upgrading our backup servers over time.

Hyper-V is certainly of interest to us ­ the only reason we are not doing something with it now is that we are rolling out a large-scale infrastructure and we have not done any virtualisation at all so far. We did do some work around virtualisation with Microsoft back in 2004, but it did not work out. VMware is the system of choice at the moment, but we will be really interested to see how Hyper-V works out.

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