Gallbladder

Windows 8 Beta–the platform comes together

I know I am bit late to the party, but if you have not done it already � you NEED to download the Win8 Server Beta.

Notice that �8� is written just that way.  With the parenthesis.

Windows Server 8 has lots of little new features.  Each on its own does not mean much, but bringing them all together makes for some really cool stuff.

For example: 

SMB 2.2 � to most of us the enhancements mean little other than a more reliable SMB protocol.  And since Windows is the main user of CIFS (the other name for SMB) then it also means nothing to non-CIFS customers.  However, its enhancements enable:

The HA File Server � okay, this is on feature that has been necessary for a long time.  Take the File Server Role and make it an active / active Failover Cluster.  Oh, to do that you needed:

Enhancements for Cluster Shared Volumes and Clustering in general.  Lots of little things here but they all add up to a big win for the platform as a whole.  Primarily, CSV moving to CSVFS � the v1 of the cluster file system.

Take those together and now you have a resilient, highly available File Server that you can use for VHDX / VHD storage behind Hyper-V, and SQL database storage (whoa) behind SQL.

This also enables the Hyper-V Live Migration without shared storage scenarios and migration of VMs in a checkout type of mode.  Such as from your test client to the share then to your development client.

Just a dusting of the features and how they align with each other to make a bigger platform package beyond the single Roles.

Oh, PowerShell everything..  More coming on that.  Lots to consume there.  If you don�t grok PowerShell yet, time to begin learning.  You can learn some coding basics at http://www.codeyear.org/ (go do it!).