Microsoft UK Server Launch - {Bimingham}

I take a heroic day out to Birmingham to the UK launch of  Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL server 2008 and see lots of new things from Microsoft, some of which I've seen before, and learn that it's cool to put words inside curly {brackets}.

Read on for a personal view of the day.

I love Birmingham! 

Firstly let me confess to a sense of pride in Birmingham and the fact that the city offers such a fantastic venue in the ICC. The walk up to the convention centre from New Street station was particularly pleasant on this sunny March morning. The ICC was packed , Microsoft appeared to have booked all eight halls for this event, the organisation ran pretty smoothly and despite the crowds there was no real congestion, even at lunch time! If you're reading this blog from outside the UK ( and yes, a lot of people do) then do try and visit Birmingham if you are coming to the UK, but I digress.

Windows Server 

I'd come to town to witness the launch of Microsoft's latest server products. My main interest, and so the subject for this post, is Windows Server 2008. Now I've never been a great fan of Windows server or Active Directory. After cutting my teeth on Netware and e-directory the Microsoft products have always struck me as being technically inferior in many ways, largely because I felt  Windows was a desktop operating system masquerading as a server, and Active Directory  was a bolted on attempt at a directory service that was and still is only loosely integrated to the file system and user accounts. Despite this Netware lost it's dominance in the server space and it's market share dwindled to near zero (although it's investment in Linux appears to be paying off and SLES is growing steadily). I can't argue with the fact that most of the businesses around the globe seem to run on Windows server quite happily - it obviously works, but I must have been right in thinking it could work better otherwise Microsoft would have no cause for this release. I have to admit I quite liked what I saw today, but some of the features being trumpeted as {new} seemed strangely familiar.

What's New

A full review of these new releases is way beyond the scope of this blog and I'm sure can be found elsewhere, I'll just comment on the points that took my interest. Reasons given by Microsoft for the new release of server were - improved security, reduced complexity and the enabling of the dynamic enterprise.

Improved security

I picked up on three main features that were presented as contributing to security improvement

{Server Core}

One of the install options for Windows Server 2008 is to install "Core". This is a stripped down version of Windows server without the GUI and notably without .NET. This is supposed to be more secure as it reduces the "attack surface". It also reduced the server's physical requirements. Once installed Core is administered either from the command line or remotely using standard management tools running on a full blown Windows machine. This didn't strike me as being a reduction in complexity. It is possible then to install Windows as a headless black box running specific services, e.g. DNS, DHCP, IIS or as a Active Directory Domain Controller. This brings Windows into line with other Intel server operating systems such as Linux, Unix and Netware. The big snag with Windows Core though is that just about everything in the Windows world depends on .NET, without it a lot of things won't work, so while IIS can be installed it can't be used to deliver dynamic .ASP content. The much vaunted PowerShell doesn't work (Window's command line interface). I'm not sure I really see the point. This is hardly making things simpler. If you want a headless black box use Linux.

{Read only Domain Controller} 

This is new for Active Directory. The idea of a Read only DC is that it can be sited at remote offices as a cache of  directory information pertinent to the location, but changes can not be written directly to it. This is, I agree, more secure. It protects the domain against corruption on a remote server, either deliberate or accidental, replicating out to the entire tree. A read only replica also requires less system resources so could reduce the physical server requirement at remote locations. A customer case study was presented where John Lewis were able to remove the dedicated domain controller from their branch locations. This is a good thing, my only comment here is that e-directory had read only replica's ten years ago, and we never needed to have a dedicated machine for the directory service as it's footprint was so small

{Network Access Protection} 

NAP is a service included with server 2008 that restricts device access to the network if they don't comply with network policies. For example if a device isn't patched up to date or doesn't have a firewall or up to date virus scanner it can be restricted to a quarantine area or not allowed on the network at all. A NAP agent installed on the client device monitors it's configuration, devices without the agent aren't allowed to connect (assuming policies are set that way). NAP is included with Windows Server 2008 and isn't dependent on any external hardware (eg specific brand of switches). There are of course third party applications that offer this capability now, for example Cisco's clean access agent, so while NAP is useful, it's not a compelling reason to upgrade.

Virtualisation

{server}

Virtualisation, the ability for an operating system to host a number of isolated virtual machines running potentially different operating systems, has been around for several years in one guise or another. Used extensively by IT departments to build test environments virtualisation is now finding it's way into the enterprise. VMWare has been the market leader in this space and Microsoft have been challenging with Virtual PC. With Windows Server 2008 Microsoft move their offerings to a new level through the inclusion of Hyper-V.  Hyper-V has some technical advantages in that it runs "under" the host operating system rather than on top of it (this is a very simplistic way of explaining it but it's how I understand it). This results in more efficient use of hardware and better isolation and performance. I particularly liked the look of Virtual Machine Manager. This appeared to make it very easy to create and manage virtual machines, and is key to Microsoft's dynamic infrastructure initiative.

Citrix also presented at the Virtualisation session. Microsoft license Citrix technology for Terminal Services and Citrix are well known in the virtual client space. They offer an alternative to Hyper-V and Virtual Machine Manager with their XenServer. This is built on the XEN open source virtualistation product (XEN is included in some Linux distributions, notably Suse and Red Hat) but it was claimed that the Citrix package is much easier to install and get running. More info on Citric XENserver is available from here.

Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager both claim to be able to manage other vendors virtual machines. Hyper-V is not currently released to manufacturing although it was announced at the event that a release candidate is now available for download. XenServer is currently available from Cisco and an Express version is available free for individual use.

{client} 

Windows server has included Terminal Services since 2003. TS allows a client computer to connect to the server and run a virtual Windows machine remotely. The advantages are that the client computer can be just about anything with a keyboard and display, and that the client environment is easier to manage. In my experience Terminal Services (and it's Citrix cousin) is most often used to overcome bandwidth limitations when connecting from a remote location to a central office. A number of improvements to the way TS works are offered in Windows Server 2008 that overcome problems with printing and managing user profiles.

{application}

Sometimes you don't need to virtualise a whole operating system, just individual applications. This looked very easy with Terminal Server in 2008. In the demonstration TS Remote Application Manager was used to publish an application that then appeared to the user in a web portal. Clicking the application icon presented the application to the user as if it was running locally. I liked the look of this a lot.

Summary 

There was a lot to like in these releases, and a lot of new features and improvements that I haven't mentioned here and I haven't even mentioned SQL 2008 and Visual Studio 2008. Some features I have seen elsewhere in rival products but I liked the improvements in manageability of Windows server, particularly when it comes to clustering and virtualisation. These are features that are likely to benefit the larger enterprise more than SME's.

Further info on Windows Server 2008, access to demos and the virtual launch can be found here  

Average user rating