How does “Windows Server 2008” sound? Yeah, it sounds pretty bland to me, also. But it’s now official; Bill Gates himself declared that to be the shipping name for what we’ve been calling Longhorn for what seems like decades but, in reality, barely goes back to the last century.

As the successor to Windows Server 2005, Windows Server 2008 has a familiar ring to it (going back further, of course, is Windows 2000 Server. The name’s not too off-putting and should allow us to talk about the new server operating system without having to keep explaining its lineage, unlike the desktop OS where Windows 98 begat Windows ME which begat Windows XP which begat Windows Vista (and I may have missed one or two in there).

Gates was addressing the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC), an oddly misnamed gathering of software engineers and designers from in-house shops as well as third party Microsoft partners. A number of other news tidbits were revealed, some predictable, some not.

Microsoft still thinks that Windows Server 2008 will ship before the end of this year. Still, the name gives Microsoft 12 months of “slip time” should there be problems. One indication that the ship date will (this time) be maintained was the information that the highly touted Windows Server Virtualization has had features stripped so that it can be brought to market almost immediately after Windows Server 2008 ships (it does rely on technology in the new server OS).

As Network World’s John Fontana reported a couple of weeks ago: “Microsoft is eliminating three features [in Windows Server Virtualization], including Live Migration, which lets users move virtual machines between individual WSV instances without any down time. The other two cut features are the ability to hot-add resources, such as storage and memory, and a reduction to the limit of the number of processors supported from 64 to 16.”

Windows Server 2008 will also be the last server operating system shipped in a 32-bit version. There will be both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, but future Windows Servers will only be 64-bit. Not only that, but future desktop OSes will also only come in a 64-bit package. While I doubt you’ll need to scrap your 32-bit hardware anytime soon (and you could still recycle it to support other operating systems) it is something to factor into your budgeting over the next five years. The consensus seems to be that upcoming “special editions” of Windows Server 2008 - the one codenamed “Centro” for mid-sized businesses and the one code-named “Cougar” for small business - will only each have one version, a 64-bit version. That could change, though, depending on how the news is received by Microsoft’s client base.