Windows Server Division WebLog

Hi all – I’m David Hastie, senior product manager in the Identity and Security Business Group here at Microsoft.  I wanted to flag an announcement Microsoft made today in the area of information protection and data loss prevention.  It involves Rights Management Services in Windows Server 2008. 

In short, Microsoft and EMC’s security division, RSA, have announced a partnership to give companies a better way to protect sensitive information. 

We know customers face a lot of challenges trying to strike the right balance between securing information but also giving the right people access and use of it - both inside and outside the company.  Currently, it is often too difficult and expensive to protect data using multiple solutions and policies that have to be stitched together. So, we’re working together on a new “built in” approach (versus additional, “bolted on” technologies) that implements information protection throughout the infrastructure, based on information content and context, as well as the identity of users. 

With this partnership, Microsoft is building RSA’s data loss prevention (DLP) classification technology into our platform and future information protection products.  The goal is to allow customers to define information security policy centrally, push those policies across the enterprise, identity and classify sensitive data, and use various controls to enforce protection.   

Additionally, as a first step, this month the new 6.5 version of RSA’s DLP Suite will integrate with Active Directory Rights Management Services in Windows Server 2008 (AD RMS.)  This means you can automate the application of RMS protection based on the sensitivity of information identified by RSA DLP.   It will facilitate the roll out of RMS by using content-aware discovery to apply RMS access and usage policies. 

We are very excited about this partnership and our new approach to information protection.  It is a good example of our focus on delivering solutions that address security and identity together, knowing that customers Stay tuned for more updates and I encourage you to consider taking advantage of the new integration between RMS and RSA’s DLP solution.  

David

Hello everyone! Back in October I made a post about SP2. At that point, we allowed a small group of TAP customers access to the SP2 beta. Today, I am happy to announce our schedule for making SP2 available to everyone for download!

Starting today, TechNet and MSDN subscribers will be able to download the SP2 beta through our Customer Preview Program (CPP). If you are a TechNet or MSDN subscriber, you can gain access to the CPP through TechNet or MSDN today.  On Thursday, we will open the CPP to everyone through TechNet or MSDN. This CPP is designed to give developers and IT Professionals the opportunity to have an early look at SP2 by installing and testing in their environments. We hope these installs will give us great feedback through the automated feedback reporting tool to ensure we ship the highest quality Service Pack.

If you are interested in learning more about all the changes in SP2 for both Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, take a look at the Notable Changes Document. Some of the changes I’m most excited about:

- The inclusion of Hyper V RTM bits in the Service Pack

- Changes to the power profile to yield additional power savings

For more information on what's in store for Windows Vista, see Mike Nash's blog posting. The Springboard Series is also a great place for more information as well.

We are tracking to ship SP2 in the first half of 2009. We value your feedback, so please download the SP2 beta!

Justin Graham
Senior PM Windows Server

Thank you to all who attended the live webcast and launch event for the Windows Essential Server Solutions product line! The event was a great success, and we keep hearing how excited everyone is that Small Business Server 2008 and Essential Business Server 2008 are finally out in the market.

Just in case you didn’t get enough of SBS and EBS, check out the below videos from the TechNet Edge team.

If you happened to miss the event, you can still visit the DreamServer website for the on-demand replay.

Microsofties are often described as “work hard, play hard” types, and that can be no truer than when applied to the IIS team. Over the last few weeks, we have been out in force to deliver the good word about IIS 7.0 and IIS Extensions at conferences and gatherings around the globe, including TechEd Hong Kong, PDC in Los Angeles, TechEd EMEA in Barcelona, and even Digital Hollywood. But even with such a hectic travel schedule, our development team still has been cranking out new Extension updates, with three more in the last few days alone.

First and foremost, we’re proud to announce the RTW of URL Rewriter. It is less than two months since we made the Release Candidate available, and in that time we have received a great deal of enthusiastic customer responses to this module. URL Rewriter allows you to create simple but powerful rules to implement URLs that are easier for users to remember and easier for search engines to find, while also enabling canonicalization of host names (pretty sure that’s the longest word I’ve ever put in a blog posting), pretty permalinking (okay, so that’s a made-up word), and ASP.NET request routing. It can even help keep your site more secure and responsive by preventing deep linking and unwanted crawlers. It integrates seamlessly into IIS Manager with a simple-to-use administration interface, it supports user mode and kernel mode caching, and you can even use Failed Request Tracing to troubleshoot how rules are applied. Oh, and if you previously had mod_rewrite rules in Apache, you can import them. The bottom line is if you are running a Web site on IIS 7.0, you should be using URL Rewriter – there is almost no scenario I can think of where it cannot add value.

Second on the list is actually a collection of two updated Extensions – Bit Rate Throttling and Web Playlists – now combined as the IIS Media Pack 1.0. We had previously released Bit Rate Throttling earlier this year, and we had recently announced a Release Candidate of Web Playlists, but like two peas in a, ahem, Zune, we knew they belonged together once they had both hit their final milestone. Used in conjunction, the IIS Media Pack 1.0 Extensions allow you to dynamically allocate bandwidth based on consumption rather than availability, while also enforcing content playback rules. This means you can save money by not having consumers max out your bandwidth downloading every new media clip (heck, not just media – use it with any type of file), and you can make money by including advertisements in your playback stream that cannot be skipped or bypassed. Hmmm… save money *and* make money... I dunno…

Third out the gate for this week (although it actually released about two weeks ago) is Beta 2 of our Web Deployment Tool (sometimes known as “MSDeploy”). We’ve made some fairly significant changes in this release, so we’re not considering this milestone production quality (“No Go Live”). In fact, Beta 2 includes new features for both server administrators and developers. In addition to the existing functionality from Beta 1, which offered robust server synchronization and migration, we’ve also added Web application packaging and deployment that integrates with IIS Manager and – get this - the upcoming Visual Studio 2010. So you’ll be able to do one-click packaging and publishing of your application from Visual Studio 2010 to IIS 7.0, and you’ll be able to import a previously packaged application through IIS Manager, complete with components, certificates and even data.

And we’re not done yet for this month either. We’ll have at least two more updates to share with you in the next couple of weeks, so that those of you who celebrate Thanksgiving will have plenty to give thanks for, and those of you who don’t will just be grateful and excited without the need to take a couple of days off work and overdo the turkey and pumpkin pie.

About the only complaint we ever get regarding IIS Extensions is that it’s not always easy to find them or learn about what they do, so the team decided to fix that during a long lunch break. As of today, you can now visit the new IIS Extensions center on our IIS.net portal and read in depth about each one, together in one place. And yes, those URLs were all brought to you by URL Rewriter :-).

David.

Today we are proud to invite you to attend the official launch of Essential Business Server (EBS) 2008 and Small Business Server (SBS) 2008, making up the Windows Essential Server Solution (WESS) product line, at www.thedreamserver.com.

Considering how tight the economy is for the approx. 1.2 million mid-sized companies and 32 million small businesses worldwide, IT resources are going to be stretched very thin for organizations that have limited or very few IT professionals managing the company’s IT needs. As part of our effort to help customers stretch their technology dollars farther, we’ve designed the WESS products to be “all-in-one” solutions that address key customer pain points by taking the benefits of enterprise-class technology and making it accessible, affordable and less complex for SMBs.

We’ve come so far since getting the first inputs from customers and partners over two years ago. Both SBS and EBS offer a new wave of exciting features and technology solutions for small and mid-sized customers that we believe. We’ve worked to understand what customers are going through and Microsoft wants to work with you to help grow your business over the long term.

At today’s launch event, you will hear more about:

-          Microsoft’s investment into the SMB space,

-          What financing options are available,

-          How local partners are ready and trained to help,

-          How the SBS and EBS products are proven to provide value, reduced costs and increased productivity,

-          And success stories from other customers who are already enjoying the benefits SBS and EBS have to offer.

Please join us at www.thedreamserver.com to participate in the live webcast and virtual tradeshow or visit the WESS Virtual Pressroom for more information.

Hi there.  Ward here to provide you an update on Windows Server 2008 R2 which we announced last week at the PDC in Los Angeles. 

This week at both TechED EMEA and WinHEC, Microsoft provided more details and demos around features and capabilities expected for Windows Server 2008 R2, our release update to Windows Server 2008.    Key enhancements in R2 include Live Migration, BranchCache, DirectAccess, and PowerShell 2.0 to name a few. 

Attendees at PDC and WinHEC received a pre-beta build of both Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 referred to as “M3” or milestone 3.  Once we finalize the beta, we will make it generally available on our website - until then, you had to attend PDC or WinHEC to get M3.  We expect to deliver the beta early next year. 

In the meantime, there are a lot of resources and information you can take advantage of at www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008r2 to learn more.

Ward Ralston

Group Product Manager

Hi, Manlio Vecchiet here. I'm director of product management on the Windows Server marketing team, focused on Windows Server networking, terminal services and VDI. I'm in Barcelona right now attending Microsoft TechEd EMEA conference.

Whether you are one of the many IT Pros that have successfully deployed Terminal Services over the past decade, or whether your company is considering virtualization technologies to implement a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), or even if you are new to the concept of a centralized, remote desktop - this will matter to you.

Today we are introducing Windows Server 2008 Remote Desktop Services – the next generation of server tools and platform that allow you to accelerate and extend centralized desktop and application deployments to any device. So, what exactly is ‘Remote Desktop Services’?

Remote Desktop Services (RDS) is the new name for Terminal Services, and reflects the expanded role in Windows Server 2008 R2 so that you can run the desktop or applications in the datacenter while your users can be anywhere. RDS enables a full-fidelity desktop or application experience and efficiently connects remote workers from managed or unmanaged devices.  RDS helps keep critical intellectual property secure and simplify regulatory compliance by moving applications and data from the user’s access device to the data center.

The key here is that RDS in Windows Server 2008 R2 makes the new server OS the ideal platform for companies to implement a centralized desktop strategy and for partners to provide additional innovation. It introduces the new Remote Desktop Connection Broker – an expansion of the Session Broker in Windows Server 2008 – which provides the administrator with a unified experience for setting up user access to both virtualized desktops (running as a full Windows client OS on top of Microsoft’s virtualization infrastructure) and traditional session-based remote desktops. Together with Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager, the Remote Desktop Connection Broker enables a VDI solution for low-complexity, departmental environments, and a platform for partners who are delivering rich, extensible solutions where heterogeneous client support is a prerequisite, and when enhanced management and scalability is a requirement. The Remote Desktop Connection Broker it complements other, shared RDS infrastructure components in Windows Server 2008, such as Remote Desktop Web Access or Remote Desktop Gateway. With the Remote Desktop Connection Broker, partners will find an extensive set of APIs that will allow them to continue innovation and deliver added value to customers.

Other important improvements in our virtualization platform in Windows Server 20080 R2, such as Live Migration, will further contribute to making Windows Server 2008 R2 an excellent platform for VDI, improving both availability and scalability of a virtual desktop deployment.

Finally, Windows Server 2008 R2 also introduces a series of platform enhancements for remote desktop users – such as support for multiple physical monitors, redirection of multimedia and 3D content, including Vista Aero, and enhanced, bi-directional audio support.

I hope you are as excited as I am about this. Post some questions in the comments section - I'm interested to hear what you think and to answer questions.

Manlio

Windows Server 2008 R2 showed its pretty face at the Professional Developers Conference today, here in Los Angeles. Hi there, my name’s Oliver Rist and I’m a new technical product manager on the Windows Server team. I’m down here in La-La Land heaving great sighs of satisfaction as we unveil the first sneak peeks of pre-beta Windows Server 2008 R2. Though this release is right in line with our announced roadmap strategy for future Server releases, there are several items of note with R2:

First and foremost, 32-bit is done. History. Archives. Windows Server 2008 R2 is the first Windows OS platform to go 64-bit only, and frankly it was high time. Customers have been unable to purchase a 32-bit server CPU for over two years now, and the advancements in CPU architectures really dictated that we squeeze as much performance out of customers’ hardware purchases as possible. The move to 64-bit is a first step.

You’ll also find that we’ve aligned R2 development around four core technology pillars:

First, there’s virtualization. R2 represents our most pervasive move into virtualization yet, including R2’s undisputed marquee feature, Live Migration. Think physical host migrations of running VMs happening in milliseconds—no service or user connection interruptions. With Live Migration, data centers can truly go virtual and largely divorce management considerations between software and hardware, and all managed from inside a single OS frame.

R2’s virtualization also extends to a new Hyper-V for Windows Server 2008 R2 (think mucho better management, beefier resources for VMs and more). And potentially more exciting, Terminal Services is updating its remote applications feature to include a true Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). Think desktops and applications wrapped in virtualized packages, managed centrally and deployed to Windows 7 desktop with such tight integration most users will be unable to tell the difference between centrally hosted apps and those installed locally. (And don’t worry, a Web Access feature will let Windows XP and Windows Vista users in on the fun, too.)

Our second area of core concentration is streamlined management. R2 contains a host of new server role-specific management UIs. Even better, these are all built on PowerShell 2.0, which hosts a bunch of improvements of its own. For one, you’ll find over 240 new cmdlets inside the R2 box with more coming from other Microsoft platform products. There’s also a new Graphical PowerShell UI that adds developer-oriented features so you can more easily create your own cmdlets, including syntax coloring and better debugging tools. Add to that a new Active Directory Domain Services management console, enhanced Group Policy functions and a remote-capable Server Manager, and IT administrators have a lot to look forward to with R2.

Our Web concentration largely represents updates to IIS 7.0. The Web server is better than ever with new PowerShell management support, bennies gained from new failover clustering updates, and a number of popular IIS Extensions that have been rolled up into this release, including WebDAV and an updated Administration Pack to name just two. New reporting capabilities, better deployment options and more flexible deployment options with support for technologies like SilverLight and PHP—it’s a brave new IIS world in R2.

Last and definitely my favorite is the enterprise workloads pillar. Yes, this covers the heavy-iron features I love so much, like failover clustering, new reliability features and updates to enterprise storage (more iSCSI enhancements, management and more). But it also covers the end-to-end network experience for enterprise users—and that means a very cool Better Together story with Windows 7. Live Migration is getting a lot of spotlight attention, but I think DirectAccess is might be the sleeper feature of R2 and Windows 7. With DA, remote computing essentially becomes invisible for end-users. Using technologies like SSTP and IPv6 combined with way-easy management UIs in Windows Server 2008 R2, admins can build remote computing policies that let users plug into any network, anywhere and see their local network resources—completely secure, no clunky VPN required. As long as there’s an outward network connection, DA takes care of everything in the background and automatically. Awesome. And that’s just one R2-Windows 7 synergy out of many.

I’ll be updating this blog regularly from now on with a deeper dive into R2’s load of new features and its capabilities with the new client. Meanwhile, visit www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008r2 for more details as well as the Reviewers Guide I’ve been putting together for the last several weeks. We’ll be adding a lot of new content over the next several months so keep checking back.

Oliver Rist

While I sit here at PDC, Ray Ozzie and Bob Muglia are announcing a new cloud computing platform - Azure Services Platform -that runs in Microsoft's network of datacenters. In case you couldn't make it to LA or watch the keynotes today, below is a short video of Bob providing an overview of the Azure Services Platform.

As Bob notes, this new platform opens the door for businesses to quickly address challenges and opportunities through cloud-based computing.  Relative to other cloud computing platforms, some of the advantages of Azure are that it provides a complete cloud platform while leveraging your businesses' existing IT skills sets and knowledge.  These advantages allow businesses to quickly extend existing applications or build new cloud applications.

Customers tell me that they want both on-premise IT and server infrastructure as well as to be able to leverage cloud-computing when it makes the most business sense. You might be asking whether Azure will replace Windows Server. The answer is simply no. Azure is not a platform or software that customers will run on their own internal servers. It runs in Microsoft's datacenters only and is optimized for cloud computing scenarios. We will continue to innovate and ship Windows Server for both on-premise application and infrastructure scenarios and will ensure that customers continue to have choice in choosing the platform that best meets their need, whether on-premise or in the cloud. 

I wanted to address another common question that has come up when I talk to IT professionals. They ask how Azure will change how they work. Azure provides a fundamental paradigm shift in what IT professionals manage. With the Azure Services Platform, IT operations will be focused on deploying, configuring and monitoring applications. The hardware, operating system and infrastructure management are abstracted away from IT professionals and developers to save them time by enabling them to simply focus only on applications. To learn more about this paradigm shift in what is managed, you can download Azure's Customer Technology Preview and run it on your local machine or watch some demo videos.

As I've said before in my blogs, the long-term success for Microsoft depends on our ability to deliver a platform that is open, flexible, and provides customers and developers with choice. This includes Microsoft and open source technologies working together. Now we enter the next era where customers have greater platform choice to innovate and deliver value, whether on-premise or via a cloud platform. 

Bill Hilf, General Manager, Windows Server

Building off the great work done on Windows Server 2008, I’m happy to share that next week, a small group of Technology Adoption Program customers will be getting their hands on Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 (SP2) Beta. As we have done in the past, we routinely start testing a service pack release for Windows Server with a small group of testers first before making the beta more broadly available to the public. Windows Server 2008 helped make major strides in the areas of Web, Virtualization, and Security. SP2 builds upon this by enhancing the operating system for IT Professionals.

Windows Server 2008 SP2 addresses feedback from our customers. It contains all previously released fixes integrated into a single service pack covering both server (Windows Server 2008) and client (Windows Vista) versions. We adopted a single serviceability model for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista when we launched Windows Server 2008. Because of this, Microsoft can provide customers with a single, high-quality update that minimizes deployment and testing complexity.

In addition to the above, Windows Server 2008 SP2 contains two changes that will ease deployment and help reduce cost.

- Hyper-V RTM is included

- Additional changes to the power profile have yielded a 10% improvement over the power profile of Windows Server 2008 RTM

These two changes will help customers save money and ease deployment of Hyper-V for IT Professionals.

I’m very excited about SP2 and will share more information in the coming months.

Justin Graham
Senior Technical Product Manager
Windows Server Group

As part of the HPC Pan-European launch event, Microsoft had the honor of launching Windows HPC Server 2008 at the very stable that has spawned the most creative, stylish and did I forget to mention, wicked fast sports cars-Ferrari!.

Relying on consistent, breakthrough innovation in all aspects of automotive technology, Ferrari brings to market awe inspiring cars that simply take your breath High performance computing (HPC) has long been a strategic asset that has helped their engineers develop the right technology components – engines, aerodynamics, gears, braking etc. – that help make great cars.    Therefore, when Ferrari decided to deploy Windows HPC Server 2008  to power the same demanding simulation workloads that were being run on Linux based HPC, one thing was clear, the notion of performance being a question mark on the Windows platform for HPC was banished forever. And I’m talking about real-world-performance-you-can-use, type performance, not a synthetic benchmark workload that is the fixation of everyone in the business. Although, we are doing OK there as well.

Shifting gears a little bit, while speed is exhilarating, it would be ignorant of me to not acknowledge the fact that the automotive industry is at cross roads today. With rising fuel costs, alternative fuel technologies that power automobiles of tomorrow, require innovations to be made today. NuCellSys GmbH, a 50/50 joint venture between Daimler and Ford Motor Company, is one such firm at the forefront of innovation, developing fuel cell systems for automotive applications.

Unlike Ferrari, NuCellSys GmbH was investigating HPC for the first time. The need for HPC was felt when it became clear that the engineers’ workstations would simply not be able to sustain simulation models that were pushing multi-million elements in size. For NuCellSys, ensuring the scientist and engineers existing workflow was undisturbed while ensuring that the IT staff could easily and efficiently deploy and manage a HPC solution were the top requirements, in addition to a scalable high performance computing solution. Introducing an entirely new operating system with associated HPC stack overhead costs was not an option; Windows based HPC then, was a natural fit. NuCellSys is confident that the Windows based HPC cluster will take all of 1.5 hours/ week for cluster administration.

So here we are, a little over 2 years after we launched version 1 of our HPC product, powering simulations for the most demanding sports car company in the world and helping foster innovation for an HPC new comer. 

Very recently, we announced the availability of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (Web PI) in Beta. If you remember, this is a tool that allows you to obtain and install Web server components, development tools and database technologies to implement an integrated Web platform for your development or hosting environment, and that provides end-to-end functionality to support ASP.NET, PHP, and other types of Web application.

And speaking of applications, what do you do once you have this integrated Web platform in place and you’re ready to get an e-commerce, content management, community discussion, or personal presence site online? You could always build one from scratch, and with ASP.NET and Visual Web Developer 2008 SP1 Express in place, you have a great set of tools to help you, but wait - don’t many of these applications already exist in the community? Why build something that already exists? But where do you get those applications? And how do you install and configure them?

That’s where the Web Application Installer (or “Web AI” – not to be confused with Haley Joel Osment’s home page) comes in. Web AI is a companion to Web PI, and is a single installer that runs on Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 to download, install and configure many popular community and open source applications on IIS 7.0. Available applications include DotNetNuke, Drupal, Gallery, Graffiti, osCommerce, PHPBB, and Wordpress, with more on the way.

Web AI downloads each application from its original source, so if the application is updated, you know that Web AI will be pointing to the latest and greatest bits. In addition, Web AI will check for the presence of prerequisite components before installing the application, and after installation, it will offer configuration pages so that you can set up an associated database (another great reason why we included both SQL Server 2008 Express and the SQL Server driver for PHP in Web PI) and if needed, personalize your application by entering credentials and setting application options.

Remember, this is just a beta release, so you can expect to see more functionality and even greater integration as we update this tool in the months to come. And as with Web PI, we have created a Web AI forum where you can discuss Web AI and provide feedback or make suggestions to us, so do let us know what you think.

David Lowe.