Report from the 2008 Wave launch event

Every time one of these events comes along I get my hopes up that it will be useful, educational or even slightly entertaining. And every time I go home disappointed. Today's even was no exception.

Maybe I should've known something was up when they sent a Technical Fellow to give the keynote rather than a C-series exec. Don't get me wrong, the guy spoke well and was truly excited about the technology, but the fact that it was lesser material meant it didn't rate one of the big wigs. The keynote was nothing new, much less groundbreaking. They focused on the rationalization of IT, which is Microsoft's big push these days. Basically the goal is to move from IT being a cost center to a strategic value in any organization. This is done via lower TCO and more efficient systems, as well as increased manageability and control of the systems. It looks like the 2008 products will deliver on this, but it just isn't that sexy for a major launch event. Or maybe it is because the vendor "showcase" was horrible. Just the usual faces (AMD, Intel, Citrix, Novell, Nortel, EMC, etc.) and nothing exciting at all from any of them.

They also did a couple demos, including showing off the Hyper-V virtualization platform, IIS7, Terminal Services, SQL Server and a bunch of AD/GPO stuff. Some notes on each are below.

Hyper-V
Hyper-V is pretty slick, especially the integration with the various other Microsoft technologies like PowerShell and the Systems Center Operations Manager (nee MOM) tool. Being able to provision guest systems via PowerShell is very slick. So is the self-service portal for end-users requesting the VM and admin approval. I know that VMware has similar deployment tools available, but so will Microsoft, so VMware will be losing that advantage. VMware still has several other advantages, like Vmotion, that Microsoft doesn't, so Hyper-V will likely remain a dev environment tool for at least this revision, but progress is being made and VMware won't be alone out there forever.

Active Directory & Group Policy
This seems to be the main area of improvement for the Server platform, at least from an IT manager's perspective. The new Group Policy management tools have some great new features, including search filters and the ability to comment individual settings within the GPOs (and also search on the comments). They also allow for default template policies to be defined and then used to deploy actual policies within an organization. Microsoft has also integrated the Desktop Standard package that they recently purchased to allow for the management of many more settings and preferences, not just the pieces that have historically been part of GPOs. Policies can now control drive mappings, environment variables, shares, ini files, etc. This is a great improvement from a manageability perspective.

On the Active Directory front a number of changes have been implemented in the overall architecture. AD services now run as a service on the server, so you can stop the service and perform maintenance on the system (NTDSUtil) without rebooting the server into AD restore mode. Additionally there are some new options in AD Users & Computers to help prevent the accidental deletion of OUs and to provide access to most attributes of all objects, avoiding the need to use ADSIEdit. Password policies are no longer global; they can be applied to individuals, groups, OUs or any other collection of users you can manage to identify. Microsoft has also introduced the concept of AD snapshots to allow rollbacks should things go awry, including reversing of schema changes.

There is also the read-only domain controller. I mentioned it previously and it is actually better than I had thought. It can be configured to not cache any authentication data if you're really worried about it being compromised. But if the authentication data is cached and then the server is lost there are some very useful options. When you delete the object from AD you have the option of resetting the user passwords for any accounts that were cached on the server and/or generating a list of the users so that you can manually deal with the situation. Ironically, the read-only domain controller is a throwback to the good old days of the NT4 backup domain controllers that everyone celebrated the demise of, but that's a whole different post waiting to happen.

IIS7
The new incarnation of the IIS platform has a couple great features for operators of web server farms, but very little for the occasional web server operator. One nice feature is the ability to have a custom configuration file that all web servers base their metabase configuration on. This helps prevent the "new" server being misconfigured and breaking web apps. Also included are some new security models that allow for users to be granted admin rights for a specific web app rather than the whole server. Nice features, but nothing groundbreaking if you aren't running a hosting service.

Terminal Services
Much progress was made in the application presentation capabilities for Terminal Services. There is the new "Gateway" functionality that is comparable to the Citrix Web Interface + Citrix Secure Gateway/Citrix Access Gateway. Individual apps can be published and presented to end users through links (including a nice SharePoint module similar to the WISP from Citrix) and are accessed via an RDP connecction tunneled through SSL, allowing access from just about any network connection (no firewall issues) and the seamless window for the app. The other big deal about Terminal Services is that it means all the apps have to run on the 2008 systems. It is supposed to be relatively similar to Vista from an application compatibility standpoint, which is either really good news or really bad news, depending on whether your apps work on Vista. The UI isn't the Vista UI, so that will be interesting in terms of how the user experience plays out.

SQL Server 2008
Much like the IIS7 improvements, the SQL Server 2008 updates are targeted very much at organizations that heavily leverage SQL server services. Among the improvements are the ability to control CPU utilization on a per-database level and compliance policies that can be defined and tested against to ensure that all DBs are configured correctly. It doesn't look like the policies can be used for enforcement, but auditing isn't a bad start. The Business Intelligence pieces of SQL Server 2008 are also rather improved. The integration with the other Microsoft platforms - namely Office 2007, SharePoint and PerformancePoint - is very slick, which is great if you're using the data warehousing features.

Clustering
There are some interesting new features available in the clustering area. The presenters were real big on all the new wizards and checks that make cluster setup easier. I never really found it all that complicated, but I guess it can be. The 2008 version will support GUID Partition Table drives (>2TB volumes) and will also support geo-clustering without requiring the various nodes to remain on the same IP subnet. This is a big improvement in Exchange 2007 clustering for folks looking at the Standby Continuous Replication (SCR) option, as it now allows SCR to happen without spanning subnets across the WAN. There will be support for some cluster configurations in the Hyper-V environment, as well as several new migration tools to help move from 2003 to 2008 and from standalone systems to clusters.

So there was plenty of useful information, but nothing all that astonishing. Considering that it was a PR event more than anything else, I guess I shouldn't be surprised.