Features of Windows Server 2008
Server Core
Windows Server 2008 includes a variation of
installation called 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 does not include
the .NET Framework, Internet Explorer, Windows Power Shell 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. Server Core can
also be used to create a cluster with high availability using fail
over clustering network load balancing.
Andrew Mason, a program manager on the Windows
Server team, noted that a primary motivation for producing a Server Core
variant of Windows Server 2008 was to reduce the attack surface of
the operating system, and that about 70% of the security vulnerabilities in
Microsoft Windows from the prior five years would not have affected Server
Core.
Active Directory
roles
Active Directory roles are 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 Meta directory
Services. Each of these services represents a server role.
Fail-over
Clustering
Windows Server 2008 offers high-availability to
services and applications through Fail-over Clustering. Most server
features and roles can be kept running with little to no downtime.
In Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008
R2, the way clusters are qualified changed significantly with the introduction
of the cluster validation wizard. The cluster validation wizard is a
feature that is integrated into fail-over clustering in Windows Server 2008 and
Windows Server 2008 R2. With the cluster validation wizard, an administrator
can run a set of focused tests on a collection of servers that are intended to
use as nodes in a cluster. This cluster validation process tests the underlying
hardware and software directly, and individually, to obtain an accurate
assessment of how well fail-over clustering can be supported on a given
configuration.
Note: This feature is only available in Enterprise
Self-healing
NTFS
In Windows versions prior to Windows Vista, 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.
Hyper-V
Hyper-V is hyper visor-based virtualization software,
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 hyper visor host allowing
Xen-enabled guest operating systems to run virtualized. A beta
version of Hyper-V shipped with certain
x86-64 editions of Windows Server 2008,
prior to Microsoft's release of the final version of Hyper-V on 26 June 2008 as
a free download. Also, a standalone version of Hyper-V exists; this version
supports only x86-64 architecture. While the IA-32 editions of
Windows Server 2008 cannot run or install Hyper-V, they can run the MMC snap-in
for managing Hyper-V.
The stand-alone Hyper-V Server variant does not
require an existing installation of Windows Server 2008 nor Windows Server 2008
R2. The standalone installation is called Microsoft Hyper-V Server for the
non-R2 version and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. Microsoft Hyper-V server
is built with components of Windows and has a Windows Server Core user
experience. None of the other roles of Windows Server are available in
Microsoft Hyper-V Server. This version supports up to 64 VMs per system. System requirements of
Microsoft Hyper-V server are the same for supported guest operating systems and
processor, but differ in the following:
§
RAM: Minimum: 1 GB RAM; Recommended: 2 GB RAM or greater; Maximum
1 TB.
§
Available disk space: Minimum: 8 GB; Recommended: 20 GB or greater.
Windows System Resource
Manager
Windows System Resource Manager (WSRM) is
integrated into Windows Server 2008. It provides resource management and can be
used to control the amount of 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 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 SCW 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.
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