Today at the Microsoft BUILD conference I had the pleasure of introducing the developer preview of the next release of Windows Server codenamed Windows Server 8, now available on MSDN. In a room full of software developers and hardware partners I got to share some of our thinking behind the design of Windows Server 8 to help them prepare their new and existing applications, systems, and devices for the new release. Now, on this blog, I want to share that same thinking more broadly with a series of posts from me and members of my team.
Let me start with a reminder that this is a developer preview version, the purpose of which is to enable our development team to engage with the industry as we progress toward final release. This developer preview is not for deployments in enterprise environments. However we do welcome feedback from IT professionals doing early evaluations, and I would like to thank many of you for your help in getting us to this point. So far we have surveyed over 26,000 customers, had more than 200 customer meetings and documented over 6000 customer requirements during the course of planning and development.
As the person who leads Windows Server and Windows Azure engineering, I have had the experience of building and operating a cloud platform. We have been able to apply many of our insights from Windows Azure to Windows Server 8, enabling us to deliver world class cloud capabilities to enterprises of all sizes. Windows Server 8 will be a big leap forward, especially in terms of helping IT organizations progress beyond virtualization to build private cloud services. We innovated and worked with the industry on virtualizing network and storage infrastructures for multitenant support. Our goal is to give customers the choice and flexibility to build and deploy applications across their choice of private and public cloud environments, or a combination of both.
Another big area of focus is on manageability and serviceability of cloud infrastructure without service down time. For example, one of the most common customer comments we have heard is that patching and updating servers is a costly and error prone process. We are delivering new technologies, such as “cluster aware updating,” and the ability to script workflows with Powershell to make it an easier and repeatable process to patch multiple servers while maintaining continuous service availability.
Continuous availability of services typically requires expensive hardware infrastructure, but not every IT organization can afford the necessary hardware. So, with Windows Server 8 we are delivering high availability and disaster recovery at a much better price point, using software technologies and commodity networking, storage and servers. For example, we are giving customers access to high-end storage capabilities that before required specialized hardware, such as device pooling, disk virtualization, and thin provisioning, in Windows Server 8. To evaluate how development is progressing I have a server in my office with 10 disk drives ranging in size from .5 to 3 terabytes. I find it very easy and quick to pool the disk drives, create volumes, and have them available for service within minutes using the new built in tools.
This is just a taste of what’s coming in Windows Server 8. There is much, much more to discuss over the coming weeks and months, so I’ve asked some of our engineering leaders to write posts on this blog to further explain some of the hundreds of new features. Be on the lookout for those posts in the coming weeks and months. We look forward to engaging with you on the new technologies in Windows Server 8
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