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Thoughts from the field on Windows Server 2008 in Education

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Willie O'Connor works in the CS department in Trinity College in Dublin and has this to share with us:

"I've been evaluating Windows Server 2008 from Beta 3 through to the current release of RC0 from the perspective of upgrading an optimising the current domains within the new restructured School of Computer Science and Statistics. We have a range of hardware running Server 2000 and Server 2003 and because of this I've been looking at both the core editions and the full edition with the view to using the core edition on older hardware for student usage and using virtualisation on our newest hardware.

So far with all editions I've found the install particularly easy and fast.  The changing of password on first install is great reminder and the "Roles" made it easier to configure the machines for what I wanted to use them for.

I'll admit the Core edition is a little more difficult to get started and learning the command syntax is tricky but in the end it was very quick to get roles installed without all the wizards :) and it will be great for the servers that hardly ever need console access. My plan is to use this on Student Project machines that only need remote access and the ease of setting up IIS7 accounts and delegation of permissions to the students should make the system more stable. Which brings me on to PowerShell..

At first I hadn't really thought of using PowerShell as I was already doing a fair bit of VBscripting to get jobs done but I found more and more that some tasks were easier to do with PowerShell and so I've started using this for all my scripting jobs for both Server 2008 and the current servers/workstation setup. This has made automation a lot easier even though a bit of a learning curve.

I'm looking forward to RC1 of Server 2008 and to play around with Virtualisation and trying to get it to play nice with our unix systems in the coming months.."

My son is in first year at Trinity - sounds like he'll be using Windows Server 2008 before too long.

Dave.