Microsoft ships final Longhorn preview

Longhorn Server is set to ship in the second half of the year, Microsoft says.

Microsoft Wednesday shipped out the last preview of its Longhorn Server beta. Next up is the planned release of the Beta 3 milestone that will be the final version for testing before the operating system is generally available later this year.

Longhorn is currently at the Beta 2 stage, with Microsoft shipping incremental upgrades it calls a Community Technology Preview (CTP). The CTP for April was posted Wednesday to the Microsoft Connect site for beta testers.

“This CTP is the build that we will be asking beta customers to test and evaluate and then let us know if we are ready to ship Beta 3,” says Helene Love Snell, senior product manager, Windows Server Division. The April CTP is the functional equivalent of Beta 3. “[This CTP] has all the features/functionality that customers will see in Beta 3,” she says.

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Microsoft Wednesday shipped out the last preview of its Longhorn Server beta. Next up is the planned release of the Beta 3 milestone that will be the final version for testing before the operating system is generally available later this year.

Longhorn is currently at the Beta 2 stage, with Microsoft shipping incremental upgrades it calls a Community Technology Preview (CTP). The CTP for April was posted Wednesday to the Microsoft Connect site for beta testers.

“This CTP is the build that we will be asking beta customers to test and evaluate and then let us know if we are ready to ship Beta 3,” says Helene Love Snell, senior product manager, Windows Server Division. The April CTP is the functional equivalent of Beta 3. “[This CTP] has all the features/functionality that customers will see in Beta 3,” she says.

The April CTP will be the last before Beta 3, which if Microsoft follows its CTP pattern should ship in May. The company’s annual WinHec conference begins May 15 and Longhorn is a major part of the agenda.

Snell would only say Beta 3 is still on track for release in the first half of 2007. Longhorn Server is set to ship in the second half of the year.

She confirmed that the beta includes PowerShell, which Microsoft said last week would be included in Longhorn Server. PowerShell is a command line interface and scripting environment targeted at making it easier for IT administrators to manage their Windows environment from Exchange 2007 to Windows Server.

PowerShell also works with Microsoft’s System Center family of management tools.

Microsoft plans to distribute Beta 3 to a wider number of users than the 500,000 beta testers of Beta 2, which shipped in May 2006.

The server also will include the Terminal Server Gateway, which will support the use of Vista running on virtual servers loaded on centralized servers. Also, within 180 days of Longhorn Server’s shipment, Microsoft will release its hypervisor virtualization technology, which is code-named Viridian. It also plans to ship shortly after Longhorn a middleware technology called Security Token Service that is key to its identity management infrastructure.

One of Longhorn’s major features is called Server Core, which is made up of the Windows kernel and a set of infrastructure services such as DNS and DHCP.

The modular design of Server Core is intended to give users the ability to deploy only the components of the operating system they want in order to build role-based servers that are less complex and more secure. Users can install just the Server Core, which can only be administered from a command line prompt, or add on other services. In the April CTP, Server Core supports Print Server and Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services as Server Core roles.

The CTP also introduces the editions of Longhorn, including Standard, Enterprise and DataCenter. A separate version is available for Itanium-based systems, according to Microsoft.

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