Heroes Happen 2008 Launch – the pitch

So the pitch here is to the IT Pro’s where they are saying that the real Heroes in the industry are us the IT Pro. They want to change the current 80/20 Maintenance/Innovation ratio to enable us as Pros to be able to spend 80% of our time on innovation and only 20% of our time for maintenance. Finally – I think Microsoft get it. We as IT Pros should NOT be spending our time looking after the systems – we should be spending our time trying hard to make the infrastructure a strategic asset for our customers. Heck – it’s only something I’ve been trying to do for over 10 years now!

Interesting – Bob Kelly – Senior VP of Microsoft is saying that Vista SP1 is intended for the IT professional and not the consumer. He’s saying that now it’s here, we can start to deploy Vista… I could look at this two ways, one being that Microsoft themselves did not REALLY feel that Vista was ready for deployment now, or the other way is that they recognise that WE IT Pros’ are not deploying their products en masse until they have a Service Pack 1. If it’s the later then I can only hope that they don’t decide for marketing purposes to pus Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 1 out next month – just to convince us that it’s ready for mass deployment 🙂

Secure out of the box – Server Core is being touted as having higher security because it does not have lots of the same attack surface as the full Server 2008 product. Lower patching requirements too as most things are turned off by default. They claim that Server core gives a 60% reduction of the need to patch the server due to this. I guess that will also translate into reduced reboots too which contributes to higher uptimes.

Virtualisation – aka HyperV technology. apparently only 10% of the server hardware out there is being used for Virtualisation – that means that 90% of the servers are running a single copy of Windows Server. With the licensing changes to Windows Server of late, such that a Windows Server Standard edition can run a single virtual instance for no additional cost, this gives us the capabilities to segregate applications into a virtual environment far more easily and cost effectively than before.

Terminal Server Remote Apps – another great feature that exists only with Windows Server 2008. This cool feature will allow you to deploy applications on a Terminal server and have them run on an end users machine virtually. The application will run on a Terminal Server, but the users experience will be that of a local application.