The Minority Report

I just thought this was cute…anthropomorphizing a computer…

Do you remember the tale of the Windows Server 2008 “Lone Server”? Maybe it was read to you as a bedtime story as a change from “Mommy, Why Is There a Server in the House?” There he was, this poor Windows Server 2003 server, all alone in a server farm of Windows Server 2008 machines. Out-of-date. Out-of-style. Out-of-touch with the needs of modern Web server administrators.

Well let’s hope the Windows Server 2008 computers didn’t laugh too heartily at his fate, because they’re about to suffer the same. Recently, in a typically convoluted Web 2.0 fashion, I Twittered an Ars Technica article describing how Netcraft noticed that many requests to www.microsoft.com were being handled by a server reporting as “Microsoft-IIS/7.5”. IIS 7.5 is the Web server in Windows Server 2008 R2, now available in Beta, that builds on all the good stuff in IIS 7.0 (that’s right: more reliable, more control, more secure, more choice), and integrates IIS Extensions such as FTP, WebDAV and the IIS Administration Pack. And of course, Windows Server 2008 R2 also provides full ASP.NET support on Server Core installations, and includes a new Web Administration module and IIS cmdlets for Windows PowerShell 2.0.

So what are the details of the Microsoft.com implementation? Well, although many requests are being served by IIS 7.5, we have not updated the entire server farm.  For example, in one cluster of servers we have left a single “Lone Server” running Windows Server 2008 to act as a control and provide side-by-side comparisons (and at weekends to go prop up a bar with Windows Server 2003 where they drown their sorrows together). There are still also full clusters running on Windows Server 2008 so that we can do a cluster-to-cluster comparisons and provide a greater degree of failover, although it is our plan to have Microsoft.com completely migrated to Windows Server 2008 R2 well before RTM.

Microsoft.com Now Running Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta