Windows 2008 R2 Beta

The virtualization features have really benn beefed up, Terminal services get a make-over, IIS gets an upgrade, and much more

Friday, May 01, 2009

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Microsoft released R2 Beta of Windows 2008 Server in April. The new version has many enhancements including new versions of Hyper-V, IIS and enhanced support for Windows 7. Here we take a look at some of the new features present in it.

Virtualization improvements
Hyper-V was one of the most talked about features of Windows 2008. In R2 too, Hyper-V gets a new version. New version of Hyper-V has support for Live Migration, which allows movement of VMs between two physical server without any downtime. Live migration utilizes a new feature in R2 Beta called Cluster Shared Volumes in failover clustering. According to MS, these CSV volumes allow multiple nodes in a failover cluster to access same Logical unit number at the same time.

Terminal Services gets a new name in 2008 R2 Beta -Remote Desktop Services (RDS). In R2 Beta, RDS RemoteApp provides Presentation virtualization which creates a virtualized environment in which processing of an application can be isolated from I/O and graphics, and application can be controlled from another location. In other virtualization improvements, Hyper-V2.0 now have support for 32 processors and also making a comeback in is the hot addition and removal of Virtual hard disks from Virtual machines. Also new version of Hyper-V has support for Second Level Address Translation,TCP Offload and Jumbo Frames.

New configuration editor in IIS7.5 allows users to edit configuration of web application.

IIS
A new version of IIS too is shipped with Windows 2008 R2. New version IIS 7.5 comes with many enhancements which aim to make deployment and management of Web applications easier.It has a PowerShell snap-in which allows administrators to script most commonly performed management tasks. Also included are IIS-specific cmdlets which make adding,deleting and modification of sites and applications easier.

Another Enhancement is a Configuration Editor for managing web server as well as web application settings. Also now users can easily access FastCGI and ASP.NET applications which were earlier hidden. Another addition is Request filtering module, which provides filtering features that were earlier present in URLScan3.1.

R2 Beta uses dynamic I/O redirection mechanism in which I/O can be rerouted inside the Failover cluster to provide improved cluster node connectivity.

In addition to this, R2 has a new version of FTP server services which is integrated with IIS 7.5 administration interface. New FTP server allows users to define a virtual host name for an FTP site, which means, now you can have multiple FTP sites on a single IP address.

Management improvements
Now users can boot Windows 2008 R2 directly from a SAN which means you no longer require local hard disk in every server. This helps in reducing the overall storage power consumption. R2 Beta can also reduce processor power consumption by adjusting the ACPI "p-states" of the processors. These "P-states" can be configured through Active directory Group policy settings. Another new feature to reduce power consumption is core parking which constantly tracks workloads processed by every core, and consolidates the workload to a minimum possible cores and deactivates the inactive cores, thus saving on the unnecessary power being consumed by the inactive cores. Similarly when suddenly a workload requires more processing power, it activates the remaining cores.

PowerShell too gets an upgrade in Windows 2008 R2 Beta. The new version PowerShell 2.0 comes with more than 100 cmdlets. Also shipped is Windows PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment(ISE) which is a graphical interface to create and execute scripts.

In 2008 R2, FTP servers can be accessed from within IIS 7.5 manger interface.	In 2008 R2 Beta, new version of powershell 7.0 also has a graphical interface through you can easily edit, create and run scripts.

DirectAccess
To improve remote user experience, Windows 2008 R2 comes with a new solution called DirectAccess, which is also present in windows 7. This feature when enabled will automatically create a connection with a company's corporate network every time a user connects to Internet. This means users will not have to launch a VPN client and manually connect to their enterprise network, every time they need to access it. It uses IPSec to authenticate users and encrypt the communication taking place over the Internet. Also, the directAccess first authenticates the computer.

BranchCache
BrachCache is designed to improve utilization of WAN links and application response time at branch offices by caching the most requested content on the branch office network. This content can be cached on a dedicated BranchCache server or in smaller networks where a dedicated server cannot be deployed when a BranchCache sever receives a request for an already requested content, instead of sending the content again, BranchCahce server will send a set of hash directions to location of the content on the branch office network.

According to Microsoft, content transferred between clients and cache server is encrypted. At the moment BranchCache can only work with Windows 2008 R2 server and Windows 7 clients.

Active Directory
Active Directory Administrative center also gets a new look in R2 beta. The new task oriented interface is based PowerShell cmdlets. Few useful features in this include a recycle bin for Active directory objects, offline domain join and feature called Authentication assurance, which helps administraoting in mapping certificates with security groups.

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