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WestNet Windows Server 2008 Installation Services
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Windows Server Installation, Upgrade and Migration Services. |
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Windows Server 2008 is the most advanced Windows Server
operating system yet, designed to power the next-generation of
networks, applications, and Web services. With Windows Server
2008 you can develop, deliver, and manage rich user experiences
and applications, provide a highly secure network
infrastructure, and increase technological efficiency and value
within your organization.
Windows Server 2008 builds on the success and strengths of its
Windows Server predecessors while delivering valuable new
functionality and powerful improvements to the base operating
system. New Web tools, virtualization technologies, security
enhancements, and management utilities help save time, reduce
costs, and provide a solid foundation for your information
technology (IT) infrastructure.
Top 11 Reasons to Upgrade to Windows Server 2008
Microsoft Windows Server 2008, with built-in Web and
virtualization technologies, enables businesses to increase the
reliability and flexibility of their server infrastructure. New
virtualization tools, Web resources, and security enhancements
help save time, reduce costs, and provide a platform for a
dynamic and optimized datacenter. Powerful new tools, like
Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 and Server Manager,
provide more control over servers, and streamline Web,
configuration, and management tasks. Advanced security and
reliability enhancements, such as Network Access Protection and
the Read-Only Domain Controller, harden the operating system and
help protect the server environment to ensure a solid foundation
on which to build businesses.
1. Server Consolidation and Resource
Optimization—Hyper-V
Most servers operate at far below their capacities,
with as much as 80 to 90 percent of their processing power
unused, on average. With Hyper-V, the Windows Server 2008
virtualization solution, a single physical server can host the
workloads of multiple Line of Business servers. Hyper-V helps
organizations to achieve optimal use of their hardware resources
and provides the agility needed to adapt to changing IT needs.
New management tools simplify the deployment process and allow
IT departments to manage virtual servers with the same familiar
tools that they use to manage the physical servers in the
network.
2. Flexible Application Access for Remote Users—TS
RemoteApp
Windows Server 2008 provides improvements and
innovations to Terminal Services with solutions, like Terminal
Services RemoteApp (TS RemoteApp), that allow users to access
individual applications, instead of a computer desktop in a
Terminal Server session. These applications run on the host
computer and send only the application windows to the user,
requiring fewer resources on the client side, and reducing
administration and deployment costs.
3. Modular, Minimal Installation—Server Core
Many network servers perform specific dedicated and
mission-critical roles within the network. The new Server Core
installation option provides a minimal environment for running
specific server roles. This helps improve reliability and
efficiency, giving the IT department the ability to better
utilize existing hardware. It also simplifies ongoing
administration and patch management requirements by reducing the
need to update unneeded files and functionality.
For network servers that perform specific network infrastructure
roles, the new Server Core installation option offers a highly
reliable and efficient platform. Because Server Core loads the
fewest operating system components required to run core
infrastructure roles, patch requirements are reduced. This
provides higher reliability and security for core network
infrastructure roles.
4. Delivering Rich Web Content and Applications—IIS 7.0
As Web content gets richer and the Web becomes a viable platform
for delivering business applications, the Web server is moving
to the center of many networks. IIS 7.0 delivers solutions for
today's demanding content, including streaming media and Web
applications in Active Server Pages and PHP. With an updated
interface that makes administration easier, the new modular
design of IIS 7.0 enables administrators to minimize the attack
surface of the Web server by installing only the needed
components.
5. Improved Network Performance and Control—New TCP/IP
Stack
The efficient use of bandwidth has a direct impact on the
productivity of users working in remote locations that rely on
WAN connections to the organization’s central servers. The
redesigned “next generation” TCP/IP included in Windows Server
2008 provides vastly improved performance in a remote location
scenario, offering faster throughput and more efficient routing
of network traffic. Using the combination of Windows Server 2008
and Windows Vista in a branch office scenario can provide as
much as a threefold improvement in throughput over the WAN
connection.
6. Preventing Unhealthy Devices from Connecting to the
Network—NAP
With the increasing number of mobile users and corporate
partners that must connect to an organization’s network,
protecting the security of that network from outside threats is
an ongoing challenge. Network Access Protection (NAP) in Windows
Server 2008 helps prevent non-compliant computers from accessing
an organization’s network. NAP can verify the health of
connecting computers and enforce compliance with an
organization’s security standards.
7. Supporting Business Continuity for Demanding
Workloads—High Availability Features
Windows Server 2008 provides increased scalability for
the most demanding business solutions and helps keep businesses
operating through unplanned downtime with high availability
features. With support for failover clusters, Network Load
Balancing, dynamic hardware partitioning, robust storage
options, and advanced machine-check architecture, Windows Server
2008 helps safeguard against single-point-of-failure problems.
Simplified deployment and management help organizations of all
sizes take advantage of these features to improve availability
and reliability.
8. Enabling Secure Collaboration—Active Directory
Federated Rights Management
Companies need to share information with partners and clients
without losing control over that information. Rights Management
Services enables organizations to control how documents are
used—including who can view them, whether they can be printed,
even whether they can be forwarded or deleted—both internally
and externally.
9. Connecting Heterogeneous Environments
Windows Server 2008 includes Subsystem for UNIX-based
Applications (SUA), a multi-user UNIX environment that supports
more than 300 UNIX commands, utilities, and shell scripts. Users
can maintain one user name and password for Windows domains and
UNIX systems, synchronizing the credentials automatically when
one changes. SUA runs on Windows-based servers without any
emulation, providing for native UNIX performance and enabling
UNIX applications to leverage Windows APIs and components.
10. Enabling Top-Shelf Service and Support for Remote
Sites
Remote sites, such as branch offices, can be an IT challenge.
Often, there is no local IT staff, making the deployment of
software and security updates expensive and time-consuming. It
can be difficult to enforce security and IP standards in a
remote site. Windows Server 2008 enables remote management
that's almost as good as being physically located onsite,
allowing administrators to correct many problems using remote
management. The new Read-Only Domain Controller provides a safer
way to provide Active Domain administration in the remote
infrastructure.
11. Easing Administration, Management, and
Automation—Server Manager and PowerShell
The Server Manager Console provides a single, unified console
for managing a server’s configuration and system information,
displaying server status, identifying problems with server role
configuration, and managing all roles installed on the server.
Built on the Service Modeling Language (SML) platform, Server
Manager allows administrators to complete tasks with fewer
clicks without having to navigate between multiple tools and
interfaces. Server Manager also interfaces directly with
PowerShell, the command-line shell and scripting language for
automation. All Server Manager functions that can be used in the
interface are available to PowerShell scripts. The interface
even helps write those scripts, showing administrators exactly
what commands are behind each button and control, and allowing
administrators to record actions in the UI and save a script
based off of those actions.
All About Windows Server 2008
History
It was known as Windows Server Codename "Longhorn" until May 16,
2007, when Microsoft chairman Bill Gates announced its official
title (Windows Server 2008) during his keynote address at WinHEC.
Beta 1 was released on July 27, 2005, Beta 2 was announced and
released on May 23, 2006 at WinHEC 2006 and Beta 3 was released
publicly on April 25, 2007. Release Candidate 0 was released to
the general public on September 24, 2007 and Release Candidate 1
was released to the general public on December 5, 2007. Windows
Server 2008 was released to manufacturing on February 4, 2008
and officially launched on February 27, 2008.
Features
Windows Server 2008 is built from the same code base as Windows
Vista; therefore, it shares much of the same architecture and
functionality. Since the code base is common, it automatically
comes with most of the technical, security, management and
administrative features new to Windows Vista such as the
rewritten networking stack (native IPv6, native wireless, speed
and security improvements); improved image-based installation,
deployment and recovery; improved diagnostics, monitoring, event
logging and reporting tools; new security features such as
BitLocker and ASLR; improved Windows Firewall with secure
default configuration; .NET Framework 3.0 technologies,
specifically Windows Communication Foundation, Microsoft Message
Queuing and Windows Workflow Foundation; and the core kernel,
memory and file system improvements. Processors and memory
devices are modelled as Plug and Play devices, to allow
hot-plugging of these devices. This allows the system resources
to be partitioned dynamically using Dynamic Hardware
Partitioning; each partition having its own memory, processor
and I/O host bridge devices independent of other partitions.
Server Core
Windows Server 2008 includes a variation of installation called
a Server Core. Server Core is a significantly scaled-back
installation where no Windows Explorer shell is installed. All
configuration and maintenance is done entirely through command
line interface windows, or by connecting to the machine remotely
using Microsoft Management Console. However, Notepad and some
control panel applets, such as Regional Settings, are available.
Server Core also does not include the .NET Framework, Internet
Explorer or many other features not related to core server
features. A Server Core machine can be configured for several
basic roles: Domain controller/Active Directory Domain Services,
ADLDS (ADAM), DNS Server, DHCP Server, file server, print
server, Windows Media Server, IIS 7 web server and Hyper-V
virtual server. This last role is projected to be available at
most 180 days after release of Windows Server 2008; a beta
version was shipped with the released product. Server Core can
also be used to create a cluster with high availability using
Failover Clustering or Network Load Balancing.
Active Directory roles
Active Directory is expanded with identity, certificate, and
rights management services. Active Directory until Windows
Server 2003 allowed network administrators to centrally manage
connected computers, to set policies for groups of users, and to
centrally deploy new applications to multiple computers. This
role of Active Directory is being renamed as Active Directory
Domain Services (ADDS). A number of other additional services
are being introduced, including Active Directory Federation
Services (ADFS), Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services
(AD LDS), (formerly Active Directory Application Mode, or ADAM),
Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS), and Active
Directory Rights Management Services (ADRMS). Identity and
certificate services allow administrators to manage user
accounts and the digital certificates that allow them to access
certain services and systems. Federation management services
enable enterprises to share credentials with trusted partners
and customers, allowing a consultant to use his company user
name and password to log in on a client's network. Identity
Integration Feature Pack is included as Active Directory
Metadirectory Services. Each of these services represents a
server role.
Windows PowerShell
Windows Server 2008 is the first Windows operating system to
ship with Windows PowerShell, Microsoft's new extensible command
line shell and task-based scripting technology. PowerShell is
based on object-oriented programming and version 2.0 of the
Microsoft .NET Framework and includes more than 120 system
administration utilities, consistent syntax and naming
conventions, and built-in capabilities to work with common
management data such as the Windows Registry, certificate store,
or Windows Management Instrumentation. PowerShell's scripting
language was specifically designed for IT administration, and
can be used in place of cmd.exe and Windows Script Host.
Self-healing NTFS
In previous Windows versions, if the operating system detected
corruption in the file system of an NTFS volume, it marked the
volume "dirty"; to correct errors on the volume, it had to be
taken offline. With self-healing NTFS, an NTFS worker thread is
spawned in the background which performs a localized fix-up of
damaged data structures, with only the corrupted files/folders
remaining unavailable without locking out the entire volume and
needing the server to be taken down. The operating system now
features S.M.A.R.T. detection techniques to help determine when
a hard disk may fail. This feature was first presented within
Windows Vista.
Hyper-V
Hyper-V is a hypervisor-based virtualization system, forming a
core part of Microsoft's virtualization strategy. It virtualizes
servers on an operating system's kernel layer. It can be thought
of as partitioning a single physical server into multiple small
computational partitions. Hyper-V includes the ability to act as
a Xen virtualization hypervisor host allowing Xen-enabled guest
operating systems to run virtualized. A beta version of Hyper-V
ships with certain x86-64 editions of Windows Server 2008.
Microsoft released the final version of Hyper-V on June 26, 2008
as a free download for these editions. Also, a standalone
version of Hyper-V is planned. This version will also only
support the x86-64 architecture.
Windows System Resource Manager
Windows System Resource Manager (WSRM) is being integrated into
Windows Server 2008. It provides resource management and can be
used to control how much resources a process or a user can use
based on business priorities. Process Matching Criteria, which
is defined by the name, type or owner of the process, enforces
restrictions on the resource usage by a process that matches the
criteria. CPU time, bandwidth that it can use, number of
processors it can be run on, and memory allocated to a process
can be restricted. Restrictions can be set to be imposed only on
certain dates as well.
Server Manager
Server Manager is a new roles-based management tool for Windows
Server 2008. It is a combination of Manage Your Server and
Security Configuration Wizard from Windows Server 2003. Server
Manager is an improvement of the Configure my server dialog that
launches by default on Windows Server 2003 machines. However,
rather than serve only as a starting point to configuring new
roles, Server Manager gathers together all of the operations
users would want to conduct on the server, such as, getting a
remote deployment method set up, adding more server roles etc
and provides a consolidated, portal-like view about the status
of each role.
It is not currently possible to use the Server Manager remotely,
but a client version is planned.
Other features
Other new or enhanced features include:
Core OS improvements
Read about Active Directory
and Terminal Services
improvements on their pages.
Fully multi-componentized operating system.
Improved hot patching, a feature that allows non-kernel patches
to occur without the need for a reboot.
Support for being booted from Extensible Firmware Interface
(EFI)-compliant firmware on x86-64 systems.
Dynamic Hardware Partitioning
Support for the hot-addition of processors and memory, on
capable hardware.
Support for the hot-replacement of processors and memory, on
capable hardware.
Policy related improvements
All of the Group Policy improvements from Windows Vista. Group
Policy Management Console (GPMC) is built-in. The Group Policy
objects are indexed for search and can be commented on.
Policy-based networking with Network Access Protection, improved
branch management and enhanced end user collaboration. Policies
can be created to ensure greater Quality of Service for certain
applications or services that require prioritization of network
bandwidth between client and server.
Granular password settings within a single domain - ability to
implement different password policies for administrative
accounts on a "group" and "user" basis, instead of a single set
of password settings to the whole domain.
Disk management and file storage improvements
The ability to resize hard disk partitions without stopping the
server, even the system partition. This applies only to simple
and spanned volumes, not to striped volumes.
Shadow Copy based block-level backup which supports optical
media, network shares and Windows Recovery Environment.
DFS enhancements - SYSVOL on DFS-R, Read-only Folder Replication
Member. There is also support for domain-based DFS namespaces
that exceed the previous size recommendation of 5,000 folders
with targets in a namespace.
Several improvements to failover clusters (High-availability
clusters).
Internet Storage Naming Server (iSNS) enables central
registration, deregistration and queries for iSCSI hard drives.
Protocol and cryptography improvements
Support for 128- and 256-bit AES encryption for the Kerberos
authentication protocol.
New cryptography (CNG) API which supports elliptic curve
cryptography and improved certificate management.
Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol, a new Microsoft proprietary
VPN protocol.
AuthIP, a Microsoft proprietary extension of the IKE
cryptographic protocol used in IPsec VPN networks.
Server Message Block 2.0 protocol in the new TCP/IP stack
provides a number of communication enhancements, including
greater performance when connecting to file shares over
high-latency links and better security through the use of mutual
authentication and message signing.
Improvements due to client-side (Windows Vista)
enhancements
Searching Windows Server 2008 servers from Windows Vista clients
delegates the query to the server, which uses the Windows Search
technology to search and transfer the results back to the
client.
In a networked environment with a print server running Windows
Vista, clients can render print jobs locally before sending them
to print servers to reduce the load on the server and increase
its availability.
Event forwarding aggregates and forwards logs of subscribed
Windows Vista client computers back to a central console. Event
forwarding can be enabled on the client subscribers from the
central server directly from the event management console.
Offline Files are cached locally so that they are available even
if the server is not, with copies seamlessly updating when the
client and server are reconnected.
Miscellaneous improvements
Windows Deployment Services replacing Automated Deployment
Services and Remote Installation Services. Windows Deployment
Services (WDS) support an enhanced multicast feature when
deploying operating system images.
Internet Information Services 7 - Increased security, XCOPY
deployment, improved diagnostic tools, delegated administration.
An optional "Desktop Experience" component provides the same
Windows Aero user interface as Windows Vista, both for local
users, as well as remote users connecting through Remote
Desktop.
Removed Features
Backup to tape using NT Backup
NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol) is no longer part of
Internet Information Services 7.0
Exchange backups. (NTBackup was replaced with VSS-based Windows
Server Backup). Alternate backup solutions are either very
expensive or very complicated. Microsoft is pushing Data
Protection Manager, but it requires dedicated backup drives.
Editions
Most editions of Windows Server 2008 are available in x86-64
(64-bit) and x86 (32-bit) versions. Windows Server 2008 for
Itanium-based Systems supports IA-64 processors. The IA-64
version is optimized for high workload scenarios like database
servers and Line of Business (LOB) applications. As such it is
not optimized for use as a file server or media server.
Microsoft has announced that Windows Server 2008 is the last
32-bit Windows server operating system. Windows Server 2008 is
available in the editions listed below, similar to Windows
Server 2003.
Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition (x86 and x64)
Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition (x86 and x64)
Windows Server 2008 Datacenter Edition (x86 and x64)
Windows HPC Server 2008
Windows Web Server 2008 (x86 and x64)
Windows Storage Server 2008 (x86 and x64)
Windows Small Business Server 2008 (Codenamed "Cougar") (x64)
for small businesses
Windows Essential Business Server 2008 (Codenamed "Centro")
(x64) for medium-sized businesses
Windows Server 2008 for Itanium-based Systems
Server Core is available in the Standard, Enterprise and
Datacenter editions. It is not available in Web edition or in
the Itanium edition. It is important to note that Server Core is
simply a server role supported by some of the editions, and not
a separate edition by itself. Each edition has a separate
evaluation DVD.
System requirements
System requirements for Windows Server 2008 are as follows:
Minimum Recommended
Processor
• Minimum: 1GHz (x86 processor) or 1.4GHz (x64 processor)
• Recommended: 2GHz or faster
Memory • Minimum: 512MB RAM
• Recommended: 2GB RAM or greater
• Maximum (32-bit systems): 4GB (Standard) or 64GB (Enterprise
and Datacenter)
• Maximum (64-bit systems): 32GB (Standard) or 2TB (Enterprise,
Datacenter and Itanium-Based Systems)
Available Disk Space
• Minimum: 10GB
• Recommended: 40GB or greater
Note: Computers with more than 16GB of RAM will require more
disk space for paging, hibernation, and dump files
Drive DVD-ROM drive
Display and Peripherals
• Super VGA (800 x 600) or higher-resolution monitor
• Keyboard
• Microsoft Mouse or compatible pointing device
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