Microsoft's 2008 Server Stack-What's New and Who Cares?

By Michelle Savage

May 15, 2008 —  Earlier this year, Microsoft released what it billed as the “biggest launch wave in the company’s history,” which consisted of Windows Server 2008, including a beta version of the Hyper-V virtualization technology, and Visual Studio 2008. A feature-complete, beta version of SQL Server 2008 was also released with general availability expected this summer.

Microsoft Windows Server 2008, a server operating system designed to secure network systems, and SQL Server 2008, database application software, are key products in the company’s strategy to increase interoperability for customers and developers throughout the industry. Microsoft said that changes to its technology and business practices will significantly increase the openness of its products. The interoperability principles and actions apply to high-volume Microsoft products, including Exchange Server 2007, Office 2007, Office SharePoint Server 2007, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008.

But availability and interoperability do not always translate to adoption, according to industry experts. Michael Cote, analyst with RedMonk, said that it is frequently a challenge to get people to upgrade to new technologies. “Assuming that what they have works, there has to be very compelling reasons to upgrade,” he said.

In fact, most large enterprises will hold off on Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008, according to a poll of data center managers at last year’s Gartner Data Center Conference. Gartner analyst John Enck said 73 percent of the managers said they were either evaluating or had no current plans to deploy Windows Server 2008. He added that while the new product had a number of good structural changes, it lacked the big features that would motivate companies to upgrade quickly.

Lab49’s Luke Flemmer said he sees a wide range in adoption rates. “Some companies are aggressive about upgrading and others are more conservative and prefer to run on older versions,” he said. “As a firm, we are enthusiastic about adopting new products as we think they offer a lot of value to businesses.”

CheckFree takes a conservative approach with customer-facing server technology but a more aggressive approach internally. Its customer-facing solution currently runs on IIS 6, SQL Server 2005 and IIS 6, using management capabilities around MOM and SMS to do patches, updates and deployments.

“As a company, we’re very cautious, because of the scale of bill pay transactions we do,” said CheckFree’s Mark Prout. “We never go down the bleeding edge of technology as an overall strategy. We’re usually about a year behind when it comes to new technologies. In the 2009 time frame, we’ll move 2008 products into our stack.”

However, Prout added, CheckFree works closely with Microsoft to use the newest product versions internally. For example, it is currently using SQL 2008 to handle back-end internal business processing.

Microsoft’s Jonathan Perera said that the 2008 products offer numerous compelling reasons to upgrade.

“We’ve made it easy for companies to take advantage of next-generation Web capabilities,” he said. “Every organization around the world is trying to understand, ‘How do we bring Web 2.0 inside the firewall and take advantage of it? How do we take advantage of next-generation Web approaches to find a business application?’

“What we’ve done across Windows Server, SQL Server and Visual Studio 2008 is put Web platform leadership front and center,” Perera continued. “For example, with the Windows Server Web Core Edition, we’ve streamlined Windows Server to just run as a Web server. There’s a massive reduction in terms of total amount of memory impact. The result is improved performance and tighter security.”

Virtualization is front and center when it comes to new features for Windows Server 2008. “What’s happening with Hyper-V will lead a new approach to how people think about virtualization,” said Perera.

Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, the hypervisor-based server virtualization technology, allows users to consolidate servers and use hardware more efficiently. Several enhancements to Terminal Services improve presentation virtualization. And multiple operating systems—Linux, Windows and others—can be deployed in parallel on a single server using Hyper-V.

Beyond virtualization, Perera said that improvements in IIS 7 and next generation Web capabilities are the highlights of the launch. “The Web server has been fully architected to be more programmable, more secure and easier to mange,” he said. “For example, we have a configuration option that would allow an administrator to just define a simple text-only configuration file and force that across a whole farm of IIS servers. It’s very easy to manage—a real change from Windows Server 2003.”

In addition, he said that the new Server Core technology runs only a command shell so that users can administer all the roles supported by servers from command line tools. “One of the things people told us was they didn’t need to run all the extra features of Windows Server 2003, they just wanted to run the smallest amount of code for the role that that server will be performing. If it’s a Web server, they only want to run the Web server functionality. That’s something that Linux has really been able to do these past few years. We have taken that on with this role-based approach for Windows Server 2008.”

Visual Studio 2008 offers key developments in three major areas, said Perera: rapid application development, team collaboration and user experience. It includes visual designers for faster development with the .NET Framework 3.5, improved Web development tools and language enhancements that speed development with all types of data.

While SQL Server 2008 is only available in beta, Perera stated that many organizations, through early adopter programs, are successfully running the software in production today. He said that SQL server offers dramatic improvements in next-generation business intelligence, programmability and ease of management.

SQL Server 2008 capabilities include the ability to store data from structured, semi-structured and unstructured documents, such as images and music, directly within the database. New integrated services allow users to query, search, synchronize, report and analyze data. With this software, users can consume data within custom applications developed using Microsoft .NET and Visual Studio and within SOA and business process through Microsoft BizTalk Server.

“With this version, we thought really carefully about the developer and what does it mean to develop an application across the entire stack,” said Perera. “With SQL Server 2008, the entity framework is sort of a new paradigm for ease of use in programming databases. In an old world of writing database code, one would have had to know very detailed SQL languages. With the entity framework, we can take someone who’s familiar with basic .NET programming and immediately make them a database programmer. So there are some really exciting things that customers are doing around that piece.”

According to Perera, customers are especially pleased with the ease of migration of the 2008 products. “For example, a lot of SQL customers went from 2000 to 2005 and that was a decent sized challenge, in terms of being a complex migration. The great thing about migrating from 2005 to 2008 is that it’s much easier.”



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