Forster: Will Hyper-V drive demand for
Server 2008?
Laing: Oh, yeah, I think it will. That’s probably
the main new thing—most other things
that we’ve done are somewhat evolutionary.
That’s a big-ticket item that people will go for.
And the fact that we support Windows 2003
and Red Hat and SUSE Linux on Hyper-V
makes it interesting.
Lessons Learned
Forster: What lessons will you take from this
release?
Laing: Betas are important, but you don’t
get deep insight back from betas. If you do
stupid things and you have obvious bugs,
you get feedback. But we got most out of deep
engagements: TAP [the Technology Adoption
Program], the EEC [Enterprise Engineering
Center]. In fact, I would increase our investment
in those kinds of programs over time
because it’s a very rich interaction. [For details
about the EEC, see “What You Need to Know
About the Microsoft Enterprise Engineering
Center,” July 2003, InstantDoc ID 39163.]
Another lesson is that you have to be flexible
and have a structure that lets you add or
remove things—like it was pretty seamless to
add virtualization to the plan. It was technically a lot of hard work, but it
impacted the virtualization
team, the Server Manager
team, and overall project
management, but that was
about it.
Forster: What will be hard
for users to learn in this
release?
Laing: Server Core has had a
lot of positive feedback, but
I wonder how many people
are really used to having no
GUI—just command-line
scripting of everything. Certainly
a group of hard-core
people will love it, and we’ll get better as we
get PowerShell on it.
Forster: What surprised you about this
release?
Laing: I was very surprised how popular the
RODC [read-only domain controller] is, and
that came from people pushing it in directions
I didn’t expect. I had a narrow picture
of it at the beginning: It was interesting for
branches, basically. But people have been
pushing it into the front-end Web server so
they can push policy out of it. It surprised
me how popular that was because it’s a
complicated thing to do and a lot of people
are deploying that.
Perspective
Windows 2000 was notable for AD. But
industry old-timers also remember it as the
long-delayed, not-Windows-NT-5.0 release.
Thanks to Vista, the Longhorn release cycle
will be recalled as suffering from delays
and do-overs. But Server 2008 benefited
from market developments over the past
five years as Microsoft dealt with its Linux
paranoia and recognized virtualization’s significance.
Nobody will remember Windows
2003 R2 (the original vision for Longhorn),
but Server 2008 will be noted as the Server
Core and virtualization release. Sometimes
delay is a good thing.
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