For those that were at the SharePoint Conference back in March I presented with Joel Oleson and Todd Klindt or to be more exact I performed the demonstrations for this presentation. I was scheduled to present again at TechEd but due to a scheduling conflict on my end I will be leaving sunny Florida before this session. One thing I have been meaning to do was put out some posts on the various areas i demonstrated.
In the accompanying screen cast I am going to give a walkthrough of one of my favorite tools which is the Server Manager. For those of you that are using Vista are familiar with Computer Manager. Functional with a nice interface
So if we crack open Windows Server 2008 the one thing I hear alot from people is " Hey look its just Vista with a different name" So they are right in some aspects. Alot of the functionality that is in Vista was ported across to Server 2008 its not quite the same. A noticeable difference is the inclusion of Roles and Features.
Pretty cool huh? Ok so lets go a wee bit deeper and have a look at some of the benefits you will get with Windows Server 2008. Again this was part of the presentation Joel and I gave so I am grabbing some great bullet points that Joel spoke on.
Management
Enhanced SharePoint Manageability
- · Manage larger deployments easier with user driven, task based consoles with personalized views
- · Achieve higher availability by Identifying and fixing problems quicker with Reliability Manager, Powershell and IIS 7 commandlets with rich diagnostics
- · Automate Remote Configuration to streamline complex multi server and multi farm deployments
Management Features and Enhancements SharePoint People Care About
- · Server Manager
- · Reliability Manager
- · Command line tools WinRM, WinRS
- · Event Viewer
- · Task Manager
- · Schedule Manager
- · Powershell
- · Server Management (700+new settings)
- · Search and filter on settings
- · Create configuration as templates for reuse
- · Windows Hardware Error Architecture
Security
Security Enhancements to SharePoint Deployments
- · You decide what you need, secure by default minimum component install with the essentials
- · Easy to use firewall locked down by default providing reduced attack surface
- · Reduced memory footprint with IIS 7, less is more with only the modules you need
Security Features
- · Firewall
- · Security Configuration Wizard (SCW 2.0)
- · Network Access Protection (NAP)
- · New and Enhanced UI for URLScan in IIS 7 MMC
Performance
SharePoint Enhanced Performance in Windows Server 2008
- · Increased caching and compression with flexible control in your IIS 7 web applications
- · Intelligent, automated tuning of TCP window sizes providing better packet loss resiliency and advanced congestion control for better throughput and faster HTTP and file transfers
- · Loading only the components you need IIS 7 provides lean and mean web application processing
Performance Features
- · New enhanced file transfer features SMB 2.0
- · Next Generation TCP Stack, Optimized for WAN with new Sliding TCP Window Sizing
- · Reduced process and memory footprint with minimal IIS 7 Module loading
- · Native 64-bit support
So now that we have a little background lets take a closer look at some of these mentioned features. In this demo I will cover the Management features and highlight some of my favorite new tools.
Windows 2008 Server Manager Demo