WINDOWS SERVER 8 BETA AVAILABLE NOW...
Microsoft announcedWindows Server 8 and let`s focuse on Bill Laing’s blog here:
Windows Server “8” beta available now!
Bill Laing, Windows Server
1 Mar 2012 8:00 AM
The beta
of Windows Server “8” is now available for
IT professionals and software developers around the world to download, to
evaluate, and to give us feedback on.
In September we introduced Windows Server “8” with a preview to
help developers and hardware partners prepare new and existing applications,
systems and devices. The response from that community, along with hundreds of
customers in our early adopters program, has been incredibly positive. A common
theme of feedback has been how broad and deep the new capabilities are.
Now is the time for you, IT
professionals in organizations of all sizes, to get your hands on this new
release, discover the new capabilities and contribute to the development of
what we call the cloud-optimized OS.
I’ll highlight in this post just
a few examples of new capabilities that you’ll want to explore.
With the new Hyper-V we are
taking virtualization above and beyond to provide a multi-tenant platform for
cloud computing. For example, with Hyper-V Network Virtualization you can
create virtual networks so different business units, or even multiple
customers, can seamlessly share network infrastructure. You will be able
to move virtual machines and servers around without losing their network
assignments.
In Windows Server “8” we are
delivering high availability and disaster recovery through software technology
on much more cost effective hardware. For example, with File Server Transparent
Failover you can now more easily perform hardware or software maintenance of nodes
in a File Server cluster by moving file shares between nodes with little
interruption to server applications that are storing data on those file shares.
We’re also delivering a
tremendous amount of new capabilities for multi-machine management and automation.
You will want to explore the dramatic new improvements to Server Manager, as
well as the new Windows PowerShell. With 2,300 commandlets provided out of the
box, Windows PowerShell allows you to automate everything you can do manually
with the user interface. And, with technologies like Intellisense, we’ve made
it very easy for you to master all of that power.
Additionally, Windows Server “8”
provides a powerful server application platform that enables you to develop and
host the most demanding of application workloads. For example, with .NET
Framework 4.5 you can take advantage of new asynch language and library support
to build server and web applications that scale far beyond what other platforms
provide. Our new IIS 8 web server provides better security isolation and
resource sand-boxing between applications, native support for web sockets, and
the ability to host significantly more sites on a server.
This is just a brief taste of the
hundreds of features and capabilities you will find in the beta. (My team has
written a number of other posts you can read here.)
If you have been using and providing feedback on the developer preview of
Windows Server “8,” thank you! I can’t wait for more people to start trying out
Windows Server “8” and letting us know what they think.
Bill Laing
Corporate Vice President, Server and Cloud