Because I often teach classes about Vista in which Vista runs in a virtual machine, where you can't see the AERO interface, I like to use my laptop to demo certain Vista AERO features: live thumbnails, Flip3D, and so forth. So it was relevant to ask whether Server 2008 could put forward a reasonable facsimile of the Vista GUI.

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In the previous posting, I hinted at a few additional topics that would be relevant to a discussion of Server 2008 as a workstation operating system. One of those was the issue of power options. Here, the news is not good for Hyper-V users: as soon as you install the Hyper-V role, you lose the ability to make your computer sleep or hibernate (those two options are present in Windows Vista, although the sleep function is famous for having problems). That may not a big issue for everyone, I suppose, but for laptops it's a definite drawback - and even for towers or rack systems, not all servers are necessarily required to be awake 24/7.

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The first big question was number 1 - were there going to be driver problems? One of the distinguishing characteristics of 64-bit Server 2008 editions is that the universe of hardware drivers is limited to signed drivers. (You can boot x64 Server 2008 with unsigned drivers via a "safe mode" option at boot time, but who wants to go through that routine every single startup?) So, I dutifully made a list of the machine's drivers and hardware model numbers from Device Manager in the system's original Windows XP operating system.

The good news here was that after a vanilla install of Server 2008 Enterprise Edition, most of the Latitude's drivers were up and running. There were only two that the installer didn't recognize: the wireless driver and the sound driver.

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Last week, I wrote of my goal of creating a Server 2008-based laptop that I could use either as a normal business laptop, or as a server platform for testing out Hyper-V. Several questions loomed:

1. Would Server 2008 x64 support most of my (Dell Latitude D830) laptop hardware? and would Dell's 64-bit Vista drivers work fine with Server 2008?

2. Could the machine be made responsive enough to act as a viable workstation, even though the OS was designed for a server?

3. Could the machine act as a reasonable facsimile of a Vista box, for teaching and demo purposes?

4. Would the system run my various day-to-day applications with acceptable speed and reliability?

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As part of prepping my Road Warrior machine to accept Server 2008 and put the new and improved Hyper-V through its paces, I decided I needed to suck down some 64-bit device drivers. Shouldn't be too hard - after all, the Latitude line is Dell's corporate standard, and the D830 is the current top-of-the-line model. So I go to the driver download page, click the drop-down operating system menu, and find - no entry for Server 2008.

OK, it's a laptop after all, so I guess it's not unreasonable to discover that Dell's support doesn't extend to server operating systems. There IS a category for Vista 64-bit, and my bet is that these drivers should work with Server 2008. It's all Longhorn, right?

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Microsoft says that you have to be using either Intel VT or AMD-V hardware in order to run Hyper-V. Elsewhere in the Hyper-V documentation, you can read that the required support is "...either AMD64 or Intel IA-32e/EM64T (x64) processors with hardware-assisted virtualization support." (Itanium processors are not supported.) Interestingly, it isn't all that easy to discover whether a given machine meets the prerequisite.

Thinking it was time to buy a new laptop to use for experimenting with Hyper-V, I went to Dell's website and typed in "Intel VT" to the search engine. Sorry, no results were found. AMD-V?

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Microsoft has just released the final version of its Hyper-V virtualization engine. This is known as Hyper-V "RTM" for Released To Manufacturing. I'm so interested in how it works that I'm gearing up to do some serious testing on my Road Warrior machine (Dell Latitude D830). In fact, I'm going to make a serious attempt to make Server 2008 the base operating system on that machine. Rumor has it that Server 2008 makes a better workstation OS than Vista, and after Vista SP1 did relatively little to fix Vista's performance problems, I'm willing to try to verify that rumor, assuming I can get all the drivers I need (more on that later), and that my core applications all work OK.

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I have gone on record more than once in support of Microsoft's distinguishing between roles and features, in the Server Manager console. To quote Microsoft's own help system, "A server role is a set of software programs that, when installed and properly configured, allows a computer to perform a specific function for multiple users or other computers within a network." Again quoting the Server 2008 help, "Features are software programs that, though they are not directly parts of roles, can support or augment the functionality of one or more roles, or enhance the functionality of the entire server, regardless of which roles are installed."

So, DNS Server is a role, and BitLocker is a feature. Makes sense, right?

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 If your organization isn't using IPv6, or any applications that demand it, you may find that your Longhorn boxes are using a bit more network bandwidth than necessary. In fact, the inventor of DNS, Paul Mockapetris, made some fairly strong statements about this effect shortly after Vista debuted. While many observers felt that his criticisms were exaggerated, the guy invented DNS, for Pete's sake, so there's probably some truth in what he says.

Turning IPv6 off isn't as easy as it should be. You can deselect it from the network interface's property sheet, but that doesn't completely turn off IPv6, it just disables it for that interface.

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 A few years ago, the world was running out of IP addresses and the sky was falling. IPv6, with its huge address space, was looking like the solution. Then more and more organizations started using private IP addressing, and the pressure seemed to ease off.

The Longhorn technologies (Vista and Server 2008) have IPv6 installed and active "out of the box," which some say is a good thing because eventually most organizations will make the changeover and when they do, all the operating system support is present. IPv6 offers other benefits besides lots of addresses: more efficient routing and potentially easier client IP configuration, to name two.

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The fate of Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005 product has been the subject of some speculation in recent months. It's been years since it was updated to its current version (with the ungainly name Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 - come on guys, could you be any more obscure? This name reminds me of the old Merkur XR4TI automobile). Now, with the advent of Server 2008 and Hyper-V, industry observers have been curious about whether Microsoft will continue to improve Virtual Server 2005. Heaven knows there is considerable room for improvement.

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Interested in evaluating Server 2008 but don't have ready access to a Server 2008 installation DVD or ISO file? One option might be to download a free VHD (Virtual Hard Drive) from Microsoft. You can get a VHD from the following location:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=961db8ce-8473-47c2-92eb-b822ec5af0c9&DisplayLang=en

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Server Core is one of the more talked-about aspects of Server 2008. For those of you who don't know, it's a stripped-down version of the Server product without the Graphical User Interface. No taskbar, no Start menu, no desktop, etc. - although some tools do present a GUI (Notepad, REGEDIT, date-and-time control panel).

A lot of people have commented in my classes about the pricing. Microsoft doesn't cut you a deal on Server Core. It's the same price as the "full" Server 2008 products. Those organizations using Software Assurance don't really care, but smaller companies paying per-product license costs have expressed some curiosity about why a product with fewer features costs the same as the "full boat" products.

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A few years ago, Microsoft maintained a website called the "wish list" where ordinary customers could post suggestions for improvements to their software products. Alas, the website as short-lived, and if you wanted your commentary to be heard in the days since then, you've had to participate in any one of the numerous beta programs that Microsoft has supported. (And you've had to come to the realization that unless you found a blue-screen bug, your thoughts on design might not reach the ear of any Microsoft employee.)

I'm happy to report that for those of you running Server 2008 or any other Microsoft product, you now have an avenue for sharing your design suggestions.

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I’ve been reading, writing, living, and breathing Server 2008 for months now, and if there’s one gargantuan design oversight that has muscled aside all others in my consciousness, it’s the fact that Server Manager doesn’t have the built-in capability to connect to another computer. How Server 2008 was released with this huge omission really baffles me.

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One can understand Microsoft's desire to leverage technologies like Volume Shadowcopy Service and the Virtual Hard Drive format, and there is certainly far too much reinventing of wheels in the software industry. The new backup tool has some solid virtues: for example, it is commendably quick performing its favorite task of performing a full-volume backup in a disk-to-disk scenario. And many of us can appreciate being able to restore from a full backup by simply booting to the Windows Recovery Environment without having to install the operating system in order to get to the restore software.

However, we seem to be giving up a lot to get those benefits.

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Recoverability. This tool shows some good design features on the recovery side. You can boot to a Server 2008 DVD and restore (either the entire computer or its System State) from a full backup, saving you the step of installing the operating system in order to be able to access the backup program. You can also select individual files and folders when restoring data in a non-WinRE scenario.

Verifiability. If you are backing up to removable media, backups are verified for errors by default, unless you invoke WBADMIN with the -noverify qualifier. I have not been able to find any reference specifying whether the program uses any sort of verification for backups to nonremovable media.

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I've already mentioned that Windows Server Backup is fast when performing a full volume backup. In my experience, you can expect at least a gigabyte per minute even on older hardware, when backing up disk-to-disk. Network backups are slower, but still respectably snappy.

But there's another aspect to this tool's speed. When backing up a full volume to a target that contains previous backups, Windows Server Backup creates what is essentially an incremental backup, although it looks like a full backup in the GUI.

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Schedulability. No complaints here. The new backup tool lets you set your own schedule for repeating backups. In fact, the utility nudges you to create a backup schedule the first time you use it.

Scriptability. When you opt to include the command-line software as well as the graphical tool when adding the Windows Server Backup feature via Server Manager, you get the WBADMIN.EXE program as well as some PowerShell commandlets (although remember that Server Core does not support PowerShell).

For more details on WBADMIN, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=93131. Meanwhile, here's an example of how you might use WBADMIN to perform a full backup to a remote share:

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This tool is really oriented towards disk-to-disk backups. Tape drives are not supported by Windows Server Backup (another potential dealbreaker for some shops), and neither are writeable CD drives, although writeable DVD drives are (and span sets are fine). I suppose the lack of support for writeable CD drives makes sense in the context of a full-volume backup; nobody's going to want to swap that many CDs. But how about the situation where you need a quickie backup of the System State and you want to throw it onto a CD?

On the plus side, USB external hard drives are supported targets, and so are network drives. Windows Server Backup works well in the disk-to-disk scenario.

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You can't back up individual files or folders with Windows Server Backup. You can't even do this from the WBADMIN command-line tool. Heck, even Vista has a file backup utility, such as it is. We know disk space is cheap these days, but surely Microsoft doesn't think we want to back up everything on a volume every time we create a backup? This omission clearly falls into the "what were they thinking?" category.

To be fair, I should mention that you can restore a single file or folder from a full-volume backup. But that doesn't help you if you just need to back up a particular folder, and you're in a hurry. You're going to have to back up the entire volume that contains that folder in order to be able to recover it later.

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A few common backup scenarios serve to illustrate some of the strengths and weaknesses of the new Windows Server Backup tool. Let's look at them one at a time.

Image backup. In this scenario, you're backing up an entire volume and perhaps multiple volumes, with the intention of having a backup that you can use to restore a machine that suffers a catastrophic failure affecting an entire physical disk or disk array.

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Windows Server Backup is available on all versions of Server 2008, including 64-bit versions. Install it as a feature via Server Manager, either interactively or with the following command:

servermanagercmd.exe -install Backup-Features

The utility is available on Server Core systems, as well. Use the command

start /w ocsetup WindowsServerBackup

to install it on those systems.

You need to be an administrator or a member of Backup Operators to use this tool, which appears in the Administrative Tools folder after installation. When you run it, the tool presents you with a wizard interface (see Figure 1) having the following steps:

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Microsoft seems to be intent on undoing its longstanding practice of licensing other people's software for use in its operating systems. Take the Longhorn code project, for example. The evergreen disk defragmenter, a limited version of Executive Software's Diskeeper, has been replaced by new code written by Microsoft. More significantly, the NTBACKUP program from (originally) Seagate Software has also been replaced by new Microsoft code.

One could argue that licensing code written by specialists was a good thing for operating system users. Diskeeper worked well and provided a graphical interface (and progress indicator) that the new defrag tool conspicuously lacks, although Microsoft claims other virtues for its new utility.

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Starter GPOs bring the template concept to group policy administration. Using this feature can make your group policy implementation easier to use and understand. Starter GPOs also facilitate sharing GPOs between environments. They limit you to registry-based settings at the present time, but most group policy settings do fall into the Administrative Templates category, and you can always use the old copy-and-modify method for GPOs that need to incorporate other types of policies. GPOs built from starter GPOs work just like GPOs built from the ground up.

All in all, this feature won't double your productivity overnight, but it might be a convenient time-saver, and when it comes to group policy, we'll take all the convenient time-savers we can get!

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Yes, you can port a starter GPO from one domain or forest to another relatively easily through the export/import procedure. Again, using the GPMC, highlight the Starter GPOs node in the navigation pane. In the details pane, click the Contents tab. You may then highlight one (and only one!) starter GPOs and export it with the button titled Save as Cabinet... In the ensuing dialog box, you can specify the folder where you want the .CAB file to be created, as well as the .CAB file's name.

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If you open the Group Policy Management Console, for example on a Windows Server 2008 machine or a pre-Service-Pack-1 Vista machine, you will see a new container in the navigation pane, titled "Starter GPOs." If you have never created a starter GPO before, a button will prompt you to create a folder in which to store your starter GPOs (see Figure X). This folder will be named StarterGPOs and will reside in the SYSVOL share (in a subfolder based on the domain name) on all domain controllers.

Once you've built the folder, creating a new starter GPO is as easy as right-clicking the Starter GPOs node in the GPMC navigation pane and choosing New. Name your GPO and give it an optional comment.

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The most common situation in which you would use a starter GPO is when you would otherwise be creating multiple similar GPOs from scratch to deal with slight differences between departments or Organizational Units. For example, if you wish to deploy a GPO to set Start menu and Taskbar restrictions throughout your Active Directory network, but you need to make slight changes for different OUs, the starter GPO would be a nice fit. You would build the starter GPO containing the bulk of the settings that will apply to all users, then build GPOs from that starter GPO for each OU, customizing as necessary.

Now, the starter GPO is not the only solution for such a situation.

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Admittedly, it would be great if starter GPOs could incorporate settings from the Software Settings and Windows Settings nodes. However, because those nodes involve interacting services (such as the Windows Installer service), their settings are more complex, domain-dependent, and therefore inherently less portable than pure registry-based policies. Maybe we'll see these settings supported in starter GPOs version 2, but for now, we must live with this limitation...although bear in mind that once you have created a GPO based on a starter GPO, you can come back in and edit that child GPO to have whatever settings you want, anywhere in the hierarchy.

But first things first.

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Starter GPOs contain settings that you would find in the Administrative Templates container of an ordinary GPO, in either the User Configuration section or the Computer Configuration section. Group policy objects contain three (or more) containers in each of the user and computer configuration Policies nodes:

• Software settings (for distributing software via GPOs)
• Windows settings (pretty much everything that isn't a pure Registry setting)
• Administrative Templates (Registry-based policies)

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