Combinatrix

Today Microsoft announced that effective June 30, 2010, Microsoft will discontinue future development of Windows Essential Business Server (EBS), the infrastructure solution we designed specifically for midsize businesses. This blog post is to specifically answer the question around whether the change affects other Microsoft solution products.

The short answer is, no.

In no way does today's EBS announcement impact Windows Small Business Server, Windows Home Server and Windows Server 2008 and R2. 

Our decision to discontinue future plans for Windows Essential Business Server was based on several factors, but most notably in response to midsize businesses making a rapid shift towards technologies such as management, virtualization and cloud computing as a means to cut costs, improve efficiency, and increase competitiveness.  As it happens, those technologies are offered today through other Microsoft solutions, and midsized customers are adopting them, including Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft System Center, Microsoft Exchange Server, and the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). 

We believe that streamlining our server product portfolio will provide clarity for customers and partners to determine which option might be right for them.

Microsoft remains fully committed to small and medium-sized businesses. EBS customers can look forward to continued support and a number of options for continuing with EBS or transitioning to other technologies.

The Beta 2 for Windows Server AppFabric is available for download today at http://msdn.microsoft.com/appfabric.  We’re encouraging developers and IT professionals working with .NET 4 and Windows Server to download the Beta and provide feedback, as we prepare to release the final version of Windows Server AppFabric to be delivered by Q3 of 2010.

First announced at PDC 2009, Windows Server AppFabric is a set of application services focused on improving the speed, scale, and management of Web, Composite, and Enterprise applications.

To date, more than 8,000 developers have downloaded the Beta 1 version of Windows Server AppFabric.  Customers, including, Associated Press, Bentley, and Jettainer are already seeing strong benefits that include significantly increased performance, simplified development and management, and improved availability and reliability for their most demanding applications. 

Developers and IT Pros using Windows Server AppFabric can expect the following benefits:

Faster Web Apps Made Easy

Windows Server AppFabric helps developers improve the speed and availability of web applications through distributed in-memory caching and replication technology that works with current ASP.NET applications.

Simplified Composite Apps

Developers can simplify the development of composite applications with the pre-built application services in Windows Server AppFabric, used in conjunction with Visual Studio tools and .NET Framework capabilities (ASP.NET, WCF and WF). IT Pros can also simplify the deployment, monitoring, and management of composite applications with configuration and monitoring capabilities that are integrated with familiar tools (PowerShell, IIS Manager, and System Center).

Enterprise Performance and Availability

An enterprise’s most important and demanding applications can achieve elastic scale, performance, availability, and reliability (benefits often associated with the cloud) with the help of Windows Server AppFabric. These and countless other benefits from an unparalleled partner ecosystem utilize familiar skills from the .NET Framework and Windows Server.

Complementing these Windows Server AppFabric services for on-premises development, Windows Azure platform AppFabric delivers connectivity services (specifically Service Bus and Access Control, formerly known as “.NET Services”) for composite applications spanning to the cloud. Together, Windows Server AppFabric and Windows Azure platform AppFabric provide a comprehensive set of services that help developers rapidly develop new applications spanning Windows Azure and Windows Server, and which also interoperate with other industry platforms such as Java, Ruby, and PHP.

Today I want to discuss the importance of information classification and how it can be used to prevent data breaches and help organizations with compliance requirements such as PCI, HIIPA, ISO 27001, the Massachusetts Data Protection Law 201 and other similar legislation.

Information classification is the critical first step in managing data based on its business value. When the information’s value is understood, organizations can apply security policies to reduce the risk of information leakage. The new File Classification Infrastructure (FCI) in Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 enables organizations to protect data by automatically classifying files and applying policy. FCI includes the ability to define classification properties, automatically classify files based on location and content, and invoke file management tasks such as file expiration and custom commands based on classification.

Once the files have been classified, appropriate security can be applied based on the business value of the information. For example, in a PCI environment, FCI-based classification can be used to identify files that contain sensitive credit card information, and in a health care environment, FCI based classification can identify files with private health information. Once the files have been classified file management tasks can be used to segment sensitive files onto more secure storage devices, to protect files with encryption, and to assign more restrictive permissions to the files. This helps ensure that information stored on file servers is well secured.

Another concern is email. Email messages or email attachments are a security risk as email cannot easily be controlled. One of our FCI partners, Titus Labs has extended classification and information protection to the Microsoft Outlook environment. Titus Labs Message Classification can recognize file attachments that have been classified using FCI.

The Titus Labs solution can examine the FCI classifications of Microsoft Office attachments, and can apply policy that can restrict the distribution of sensitive information. Titus Labs’ Safe Recipient policies can be used to:

• Protect the distribution of email within an organization. By examining all the recipients of an email, the Titus Labs policy can verify via Active Directory whether the recipient is allowed to receive attachments of a given classification. This prevents inadvertent data loss by warning the user that one of the recipients should be removed. For example, in an internal scenario, a financial organization may want to ensure that an employee in corporate finance is restricted from sending files classified as MERGER / ACQUISITION to another employee working as a broker or trader.
• Protect the distribution of email outside the organization. By examining the domain of each of the recipients, the Titus Labs policy can verify that the domain is listed as trusted in the policy and can warn the user of a possible data breach and warn them or force them to change the recipient list. In the following example, the sender has mistakenly selected the wrong Anne Hollingsworth at an external address. The sender receives a warning because the email contains an attachment that has been classified as CONFIDENTIAL / INTERNAL USE.

Invalid recipient is detected based on classification

This is an example of the power of FCI to protect your sensitive information. Click here for more information on FCI.

Sabrinath S. Rao

Sr. Product Marketing Manager

Windows Server Marketing - ISV Ecosystem

Remember back in December, when we released the Beta version of the Windows Server Migration Tools update...the one that allows you to migrate Hyper-V and Routing and Remote Access Services to servers running Windows Server 2008 R2...no? OK, you don't. That was three months and a lot of holiday partying ago. We understand.

The full release version of the Windows Server 2008 R2 Migration Utilities is now available. The update allows you to use the Windows Server Migration Tools-a set of Windows PowerShell cmdlets that shipped with Windows Server 2008 R2- to migrate Hyper-V and RRAS. And the detailed guides that take you through Hyper-V and RRAS migration, one step at a time, are now complete and live as well.

Full release versions of other guides (for migrations that do not require the Tools) have also gone live. Check out the Windows Server Update Services 3.0 SP2 Migration Guide, and guides for the other role services of Network Policy and Access Services (NPAS), Health Registration Authority and Network Policy Server.

Your feedback is absolutely welcome, and essential to making the guides the best and most useful that they can be. Take a moment to rate the guide topics as you evaluate them, by using the star rating system in the upper right corner of every TechNet page. Fill the accompanying text box with your comments and suggestions for improving the guides. Visit the Windows Server Migration forum to ask questions, or discuss the guides, the Migration tools, or your migration experiences.

Plenty of other Migration resources are available with the new guides; you'll find everything on the Migration Portal for Windows Server 2008 R2.

-- Cheers from the Windows Server Migration Team!

BIEB stands for Microsoft’s Because It’s Everybody’s Business campaign. But it’s more than an ad campaign, it’s also a slick Web resource with loads of value-add IT Pro content. Here’s a quick update on some of the latest additions:

Where the folks in my group build the Windows Server products, Microsoft’s CIO, Tony Scott, actually has to use them. And he’s generally deploying new Microsoft technologies a year or more ahead of everyone else on the planet – while simultaneously servicing the IT needs of 85,000+ of the most technology hungry info workers you’d ever want to meet. Not an easy job. So when Tony wants to talk about the trends and innovations he sees coming in IT, my ears perk up.

You can check out Tony’s article here, as an Adobe Acrobat download (it’s right at the top of the page). His views on unified communications and virtualization were inline with my expectations, but I like his attention to cloud and employee productivity. It’s a short article, and well worth the read.

Additionally, Jeff Wettlaufer writes about the availability of System Center Configuration Manager’s Reporting Dashboard beta; Mike Gannotti gives you an inside peek at how SharePoint is powering the U.S. Olympic Committee’s pressbox site; and yours truly has a new post up there on Windows Server 2008 R2’s top benefits, which links to some deeper interviews given to Windows IT Pro magazine by Bill Laing (Windows Server Corporate Vice President) and our own Ward Ralston, my boss in Windows Server Marketing.

If you’re up for more reading, you can also download a new free e-Book (available here) entitled, Understanding Microsoft Virtualization R2 Solutions. Microsoft has been delivering a slew of new innovation around both server and desktop virtualization over the past several years; so folks looking to get a big picture handle on these new products and how to use them, this is the book for you.

There’s a lot more on the BIEB site, so I encourage you to poke around there for a while. And as always, ideas and feedback are much appreciated.

Oliver Rist

Windows Server Marketing

With the release of Windows Server 2008 R2, the Windows Server platform has evolved into a robust and scalable platform aimed squarely at the heaviest data center loads – and we’re always looking at new ways to prove it. Recently, in conjunction with Intel hardware, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V achieved amazing throughput results over iSCSI.

iSCSI stands for Internet Small Computer System Interface and amounts to a storage networking protocol that can carry SCSI data over TCP/IP networks. Because it allows client initiators to send storage commands to target SCSI-based storage devices on other machines across high-speed Ethernet networks, iSCSI is a popular way to build Storage Area Networks (SANs), as it allows network architects to use generic Ethernet components rather than closed-system SAN products. That means both a cheaper SAN network as well as an easier management stack.

The only trouble with iSCSI over Ethernet has been a nagging perception that this combination is slower than competing systems – and slow is death when you’re talking about storage. But that’s looking like a perception of the past following a fantastic iSCSI benchmarking result done with Intel hardware and Microsoft Windows Server software in January of 2010. Running on server hardware equipped with an Intel Xeon 5580 CPU and an Intel 82599 10GbE network interface card (NIC), Windows Server 2008 R2 achieved 715,000 IOPs. Leveraging new 10GbE network technology from Intel as well as the combination of Intel Virtual Machine Device Queuing (VMDq) matched with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Virtual Machine Queuing (VMQ), the combination achieved a performance result that amounts to line rate 10GbE performance and near-native iSCSI performance across a network!

Results like these prove that combining Windows Server 2008 R2 with high-performance hardware can provide bleeding edge performance without the need to move to closed, proprietary systems –while still providing enough horsepower to tackle heavy data center workloads. Lots of kudos to Intel and the Windows Server Storage Technologies team for some excellent engineering. For some more information on this benchmark result, check this post from the virt team.

Oliver Rist

Windows Server Marketing

Virtualization is arguably the hottest IS technology today, crossing from data center to desktop and spawning a wave of innovation across the industry. If all this new technology has you scratching your head, make a point to check out the Microsoft Virtualization Summit 2010 coming soon to a city near you. The goal of these events is to provide answers to customer questions about Microsoft's extended virtualization stack. Attend the show to learn how server & desktop virtualization can help you:

• Build a desktop virtualization management strategy that helps you manage your applications, data, mobile workers and multiple physical and virtual form factors.
• Reduce desktop costs.
• Enable flexible and agile IT through virtualization.
• Increase desktop security and compliance.
• Improve business continuity and end user productivity.
• Understand how Microsoft is building a solid foundation for a private cloud.
• Increase end user productivity and streamline your IT management with Windows 7.

Don't miss it!

Oliver Rist

Everybody pays the power bill. 

Well... except maybe the power company.  But who wouldn’t want to reduce that bill?  Not to mention their environmental impact?

The biggest power savings many organizations will probably experience with Windows Server 2008 R2 is through server consolidation with Hyper-V, the built-in Hypervisor.  But we also had several other goals in mind to help people manage power and control costs while we were developing R2.

One of our goals was to improve power efficiency, out-of-the-box, with no manual configuration required on the part of administrators.  This improvement is derived from a variety of features, including an improved processor power management engine, timer coalescing, tick skipping, and R2’s new core parking capabilities.

As you may have already heard, these out-of-the-box improvements can help improve power efficiency by up to 18% over Windows Server 2003 running on the same hardware.

Some have asked, “Will every one of my servers save 18 percent?”  In brief, no.  To be clear, just as a car’s gas mileage depends on many factors - make and model, average speed, city or highway driving, today’s traffic congestion, and how well maintained it is - improvements in power efficiency will vary, as well.  Your specific savings will depend on many factors - on your particular server, your specific hardware configuration, the type of workload that server is running, and the server’s utilization level from moment to moment.  The only way to nail down specific savings is to actually test it.

While working on these power management features during the development of R2 we tested a variety of servers – new and old, large and small, relatively busy and relatively idle, running various workloads – in order to ensure that the changes we were making would help improve power efficiency across a wide variety of environments.  And they do.  But the specific improvement you see will depend on your own particular environment.

Another goal for R2 was to provide new capabilities to help people measure and manage power consumption.  If you walk up to a server running Windows Server 2003 or 2008 and fire up perfmon, for example, you can’t see power consumption, let alone easily collect that data across your environment.

But with Windows Server 2008 R2 and supporting hardware – such as the recent G6 servers from HP which have earned the Enhanced Power Management Additional Qualifier (www.windowsservercatalog.com) – you can monitor power consumption locally or remotely via WMI, change power plan settings, and even do power budgeting.  Of course, these features do require some work on the part of IT administrators to make use of this data – to set goals, make changes, and measure impacts. 

R2 offers the possibility to impact the environment – and costs – in a worthwhile way for organizations large or small.

Dan Reger

Senior Product Manager, Windows Server

Danger, Will Robinson! If you’ve got machines still running Windows 2000 Server in your enterprise, your robot will be blaring this warning ever more urgently the closer we get to July 13, 2010. That’s the end-of-support date for the Windows 2000 Server platform. Folks still running Windows 2000 after this date will be doing so without security hotfixes, patches or service packs.

Keeping your corporate infrastructure, data and especially customer or partner data safe is a key requirement to stay within regulatory compliance requirements. But it also means:

Staying competitive: Move to the latest business software and the best tools for your workers, and use R2’s in-box virtualization suite to deliver those resources to your users and customers easily and with the ability to quickly respond to changing requirements and workloads.

Saving IT costs: Using in-box virtualization to consolidate server sprawl as well as new power saving features that extend from the server to the desktop, Windows Server 2008 R2 can save you significant power and cooling costs both in the data center and the office.

Easily Manage Your Network: The Windows Server family has significantly decreased the complexity of managing your infrastructure. New console UIs have been coupled with new wizards to give IT generalists the lowest learning curve possible for managing their servers. And new features like PowerShell 2.0 give Windows Server 2008 R2 administrators a simple and powerful toolkit for IT administration building custom management tools.

That said, migrating servers is no one’s idea of a party. If you’re worried about your migration project generating migraines, make sure you leverage all the resources Microsoft is making available to Windows 2000 Server end of lifers:

Your first stop should be the Windows 2000 End-of-Support Solution Center, a new site loaded with migration planning and technical tools. Check out the Windows Server 2008 R2 Upgrade Paths as well as the Windows Server Migration Tools, the Assessment and Planning Toolkit and the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit. The site also has great guidance on migration planning as well as technical guidance on migrating specific server roles.

Look for more tools and guidance around Windows 2000 Server end of life in the coming months, both here and on www.microsoft.com/windowsserver.

Oliver Rist

Sr. Product Manager

Windows Server Marketing

Today, both companies have agreed to invest $250 million over the next three years aimed at simplifying IT technology environments and driving innovation for the next generation of computing. The idea is to provide a series of new end-to-end solutions tightly integrated from the hardware layer up through applications and services - a concept we're calling the infrastructure-to-application model.

This long-term agreement is huge news for customers across several fronts. First, we'll be collaborating with HP on engineering roadmaps and product development. That means total management control and performance tweaking capabilities across the entire IT technology stack. It also means the ability to much more easily deliver on new technology visions, including on- and off-premise cloud computing. Tight product integration also means new product possibilities, notably pre-configured hardware/software stacks optimized not just for performance and reliability, but also capable of delivering push-button simplicity when it comes to management and monitoring. This will be especially helpful to Microsoft Exchange Server and SQL Server customers with easy deployment, simple management and lower TCO. Look for these products to be:

• Optimized for virtualization via Hyper-V,
• Offer new management capabilities with the integration of Microsoft's and HP's management software, and
• Leverage these technology combinations to help deliver on on-premise cloud computing in heterogeneous datacenter environments.

These solutions will combine server, storage, networking and application technologies into automated and self-managing product offerings all aimed at redefining what businesses can expect from their IT resources. And that concept will be extended beyond your in-house servers and out to the cloud with Microsoft and HP collaborating on the Windows Azure platform with new tools and services.

What I really like about the agreement is its intention to develop not just for enterprises but for small- and medium-sized businesses as well. The new IT stack that will come out of this alliance will offer tools that let enterprises build the most powerful data centers they've ever had. But it'll also redefine how small- and medium-sized businesses can compete and differentiate themselves using IT. And with both Microsoft and HP's partner networks available and capable of designing customized IT solutions using the fruits of this alliance, the next three years look especially rosy for businesses looking to maximize their IT investment dollars.  

Which also means new opportunities for Microsoft and HP's partner community. The new agreement means shortened sales cycles using new Smart Bundles and all-inclusive product packages that will appeal to many industry segments. Partners will also be able to leverage flexible financing options through HP's Financial Services as well as new sales and lead-generation tools via HP and Microsoft's combined partner resource community.

Check here for some immediately available solutions out of the new alliance. And for more information there's this outline of the new agreement as well as a teleconference of Microsoft and HP executives announcing the agreement available here.

Oliver Rist

Sr. Product Manager

Windows Server Marketing