Lately, I’ve been reading a lot about all the great new things going on at Microsoft. I’m a TechNet subscriber and I always browse through the newsletter to see whats interesting. They’re flooding the newsletters each month with Windows Server 2008. I better give it a shot. I downloaded it recently but haven’t gotten around to installing it on a virtual PC.
There’s a lot of features that are small, but still, very useful:
MMC – I used the newest version (MMC 3.0) for the contextual sidebar but not a lot of consoles had anything useful, its a good idea though and saves time.
IPv6 – A lot of improvements to IPv6 integration. The military is headed that way so this is pretty important. Network Load Balancing (NLB) and Windows Deployment Services (what? Network-install Windows??) are also good.
What excites me more is IIS 7.0. I’ve heard a lot about it and the improvements to IIS are simple but seem like huge leaps for a web administrator. Fast CGI to run PHP, application pool isolation, and the new task-based IIS Manager are my favorites. I can’t remember HOW many times an ASP-based site (SharePoint and other custom ones) failed because of application pool security/identity settings.
The security is great too, but that’s always boring. I like Network Access Protection; I read a while ago about integrating NAP and Cisco’s NAC (Network Access Control) together. That would be awesome, a unified LAN security system. I need to write about that. There’s a lot of exciting improvements to Active Directory and of course Virtualization. Personally, I don’t trust any Virtualization technology yet. Maybe I need to really get my hands on it, but it just seems to finicky.
Anyway, I’ll have to play and look around with it and record my own first impressions.