The Windows 7, Windows 2008 R2, Exchange 2010 launch was more informative that I thought

Yesterday was the Windows 7, Windows 2008 R2, Exchange 2010 launch event here in Southern California (Orange County to be specific, Burbank is on Wednesday).  For the most part I was planning on going to pick up a couple of tidbits of information, and a free copy on Windows 7 Ultimate (I’m not stupid, someone offers me a free Windows license, I’m going to take it).  However the day was much more informative that I had expected that’s for sure.

In this post I’m going to cover some of the high level information, then over a few future posts I’ll give more into what was covered.

Windows 2008 R2 Management

Windows 2008 R2 has some great new management features.  Much of which resolves around Powershell.  If you have been like me and avoided powershell, apparently it is time to get over it.  The new management tools look pretty good, and all use powershell under the covers.  There are all sorts of Best Practice Analyzers (BPAs) available for Windows 2008.  I’ll dig into this more in a later blog post.

Windows 2008 R2 Core

Windows 2008 R2 Core mode is actually going to be useful.  You won’t be able to run SQL Server on it, but you will be able to run ASP.NET websites on it, which is a big change from Windows 2008.  Windows 2008 R2 Core mode now has some configuration tools which I’ll take more about in a later blog post.

Licensing

In a very large change in Microsoft licensing policy, when you deploy Windows 2008 R2 you have to buy new server licenses (this isn’t exactly new here), however the new part is that you don’t need new Windows 2008 R2 CALs for your users or devices.  The Windows 2008 CALs work for both Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2.  This is different than with Windows 2003 R2, and may well be different when Windows 2012 R2 (or whatever its called) is released.

Exchange 2010 HA appears to be the bomb

Exchange 2010 has all sorts of very cool HA options built into it.  This includes new clustering features, as well as backup features.  I’ll dig into this later on.

Hyper-V v2

With the release of Windows 2008 R2 comes the release of Hyper-V v2.  This includes a lot of new features in the HA space.  This includes clustering, failover, and auto-poweron and off.

So check back over the next couple of weeks (after PASS for the most part) as I write more about all of this.

Denny

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