Fun future features in Windows Server

Finally something not virtualization related! As part of the Virtualization thing I attended earlier in the week we also got to talk about some things related to Windows Server that are not part of the virtualization stack. The guy presenting is an engineer in the Server group and he mentioned a few interesting nuggets outside the virtualization realm.

One of the more interesting bits was a hint that NTFS might actually finally get the update that it needs to allow for multiple host access and other features. NTFS was supposed to be updated as part of Longhorn/Server 2008, but that slipped as they weren't able to get it done inside the release timeline. But the feature is back in the product road map for a couple years out and he seemed pretty confident that it would make the date.

There is also an effort to further componentize the OS, with the goal of shrinking the core components down to ~300 MB. Of course, getting functionality out of the server would require adding more components, so the server will always be more than the 300 MB, but they're working in that direction.

And there is some discussion on improving the recoverability of servers by removing the configuration data from the servers. One thing that Exchange has done pretty well since the 2000 version is that the configuration is stored partially in Active Directory. AD is generally running on multiple systems and there are multiple online copies of the database, plus you need AD first before anything else will work. So if AD is online, why can't all the data about a server also be stored in AD? Imagine taking bare metal, installing a basic Windows Server code base on it and then pointing it to AD and just having it figure out the apps and configuration that it needs from there instead of having to do application restores and other fun stuff like that. This will likely depend a bit on the efforts to update the VHD format to be able to layer apps on top of the OS rather than just being an OS (discussed in Wednesday's post), but it will be pretty cool if they manage to pull it off.

Just some fun bits to look forward to a few years down the line...