EUIST

Related:

- Why Microsoft’s Open XML is not an open standard

Last week we already had a story regarding the Windows Server 2008

- Trend – Windows Server 2008 – last 32-bit OS from Microsoft

Below we have listed some of the 10 new features that the Windows Server 2008 will offer to sys admin people.

1 SERVER CORE

This can be describe best as one imagining a cluster of low-overhead, virlized, GUI-free server OSes running core roles like DHCP and DNS in protected environments, all to themselves, managed by way of a single terminal.

2 POWERSHELL

This is now part of the shipping operating system. The command line tool can iehter supplement or completely replace GUI-based administration.

3 WINDOW SERVER VIRTUALIZATION

The Viridian project will continue providing firms with an effective tool for reducing total cost of ownership. Some might say that virtualization is still an open market, thanks to VMware. Nonetheless, Viridian’s drive to leverage hardware-based virtualization support from both Intel and AMD has helped drive those manufacturers to roll out their hardware support platforms in a way that a third party, such as VMware, might not have accomplished.

4 WINDOWS HARDWARE ERROR ARCHITECTURE (WHEA)

Microsoft has apparently standardized the protocol by which applications report to the system what errors they have uncovered. Now, with hardware-oriented errors all being reported using the same socketed interface, third-party software can conceivably mitigate and manage problems, reopening a viable software market category for management tools.

5 ADDRESS SPACE LOAD RANDOMIZATION (ASLR)

This is probably the most controversial added features and debuted with Windows Vista as we explained here in detail.

ASLR makes certain that no two subsequent instances of an operating system load the same system drivers in the same place in memory each time.

Microsoft’s SysInternals software engineer Mark Russinovich WinHEC 2007 described malware as essentially a blob of code that refuses to be supported by standard system services.

‘Because it’s isn’t actually loaded the way a normal process is, it would never link with the operating system services that it might want to use,’ he described. ‘So if it wants to do anything with the OS like drop a file onto your disk, it’s got to know where those operating system services live.”The way that malware authors have worked around this chicken-and-egg kind of situation,’ he continued, ‘is, because Windows didn’t previously randomize load addresses, that meant that if they wanted to call something in KERNEL32.DLL, KERNEL32.DLL on Service Pack 2 will always load in the same location in memory, on a 32-bit system. Every time the system boots, regardless of whose machine you’re looking at. That made it possible for them to just generate tables of where functions were located.’

This means that with each system service likely to occupy one of 256 randomly selected locations in memory, offset by plus or minus 16 MB of randomized address space, the odds of malware being able to locate a system service on its own have increased from elementary to astronomical. We will have to see if this works as described…

6 SMB2 NETWORK FILE SYSTEM

Replaces SMB1 that has outlived its scalability according to Russinovich that noted as well:

During internal tests, SMB2 on media servers delivered thirty to forty times faster file system performance than Windows Server 2003. A 4000% boost.

7 KERNEL TRANSACTION MANAGER

This is a feature which developers can take advantage of, which could greatly reduce, if not eliminate, one of the most frequent causes of System Registry and file system corruption: multiple threads seeking access to the same resource.

The Kernel Transaction Manager apparently makes it easier to do a lot of error recovery, virtually transparently. In a formal database, a set of instructed changes is stored in memory, in sequence, and thereafter the system ‘commits’ it all at once as a formal transaction. This way, other users are not given a snapshot of the database in the process of being changed. To a user, the changes appear to happen all at once.

This feature is finally being utilized in the System Registry of both Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.

8 CLEAN SERVICE SHUTDOWN

We all know out of experience that with Windows XP, once shutdown begins, the system starts a 20-second timer. After that time is up, it signals the user whether she wants to terminate the application herself, perhaps prematurely.

However for Windows Server, that same 20-second timer may be the lifeclock for an application, even one that’s busy spooling ever-larger blocks of data to the disk.

In WS2K8, that 20-second countdown has been replaced with a service that will keep applications given the signal all the time they need to shut down, as long as they continually signal back that they’re indeed shutting down.

9 PARALLEL SESSION CREATION

The new session model in both Vista and WS2K8 can initiate at least four sessions in parallel, or even more if a server has more than four processors.

‘If you’ve got a Vista machine where this architecture change actually was introduced, and you’ve got multiple Media Center extenders, those media center extenders are going to be able to connect up to the Media Center in parallel,’ Mark Russinovich explained and added:’So if you have a media center at home, and you send all their kids to their rooms and they all turn on their media extenders at the same time, they’re going to be streaming media faster from their Vista machines then if you had Media Center on a XP machine.’

10 THE SELF-HEALING NTFS FILE SYSTEM

In the past, 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.

CONCLUSION

So many new things are in store and you can read up and far more detail about these 10 new features as follows

- Get the press fact sheet for Windows Server 2008 from WinHEC 2007

- Mark Russinovich – beyond the keynote at WinHec 2007 – Windows Server 2008

- List of press materials from Microsoft handed out during WinHEC 2007 – FAQs, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, …

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