There are a myriad of both subtle and fundamental differences in the basic architecture of Windows Server 2008, which could dramatically change not only the way it’s used in the enterprise, but also the logical and physical structure of networks where it’s the dominant OS.
The abilities to consolidate servers, to manage hardware more effectively, to remotely manage hardware without the graphical traffic, and to radically alter the system security model, could present a more compelling argument for customers to plan their WS2K8 migrations now, than the arguments for moving from Windows 2000 to Server 2003.
Based on the information we gathered last week at WinHEC 2007 in Los Angeles, we decided that rather than list a bunch of mind-jarring new categories and marketing terms that sound like rejected gadgets from the Bat-Cave, we’d select what we believe to be the ten most influential and important new technologies to find their way into WS2K8, with the help of Microsoft software engineers such as Mark Russinovich to explain their relevance. We begin at the end with our #10 entry:
#10: The self-healing NTFS file system. Ever since the days of DOS, an error in the file system meant that a volume had to be taken offline for it to be remedied. In WS2K8, a new system service works in the background that can detect a file system error, and perform a healing process without anyone taking the server down.
“So if there’s a corruption detected someplace in the data structure, an NTFS worker thread is spawned,” Russinovich explained, “and that worker thread goes off and performs a localized fix-up of those data structures. The only effect that an application would see is that files would be unavailable for the period of time that it was trying to access, had been corrupted. If it retried later after the corruption was healed, then it would succeed. But the system never has to come down, so there’s no reason to have to reboot the system and perform a low-level CHKDSK offline.”
News source: BETANEWS
