Server 2008 R2 RTM: Initial Reviews..!!!

As we all know Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 gone RTM yesterday. there is a great acceptance of these products out there and it shows in the reviews posted by Computerworld.

A few quotes:            

“ With all these new features, R2 is certainly the best Windows Server operating system to date.”

“In this day and age, power use is on everyone's mind. Windows Server 2008 R2 helps reduce and optimize power usage in most, if not all, situations; in all cases, savings can be achieved and realized simply by installing the operating system.”

“ Companies that have an extensive investment, or plans a complex deployment, of Hyper-V-based virtualization. Hyper-V is now a very serious competitor to VMware -- and once you have purchased your Windows license, the price is unbeatable because Hyper-V is bundled into the server OS.”

“Firms that have vast swaths of Windows servers in data centers where space, power or both are becoming tight. The power-usage improvement can add up to serious savings. Couple this with the virtualization capabilities offered by Hyper-V 2.0, and Windows Server 2008 R2 staves off a very serious scaling and capacity problem for some companies.”

“One unheralded feature of Hyper-V 2.0 is the Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) feature. Essentially, if you tried to set up a cluster using Hyper-V virtual machines in the original release, for each virtual hard drive (VHD) you had to carve out a LUN on your SAN where that VHD could reside. Since you would likely have 24 or fewer drive letters free, you could end up using Globally Unique Identifiers (GUIDs), those long and clunky alphanumeric identifiers, which could turn into a management disaster.

Enter CSV, which allows you to place multiple VHDs on a single LUN, while the VMs themselves still act as if each VHD is on its own LUN. All CSV volumes are stored in the ClusterStorage root directory, so navigating the different volumes is as easy as clicking through Windows Explorer or navigating directories in the command line.”

Read the full review here