When you run the fourth largest Website in the world, and you also sell application servers, you have all the ingredients necessary to prove your own latest and greatest technology. So it is with Microsoft.com and Windows Server 2008 R2. In January, Netcraft noticed that Microsoft.com began responding to some queries made to it with Microsoft-IIS 7.5 — the Web server now in beta as part of R2. Today, the IIS blog revealed some interesting details about the implementation. It said:
“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 … 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. From a hardware perspective, many of the HP servers on which Microsoft.com is hosted require no updates or reconfiguration, and we expect that customers with supported Windows Server 2008 hardware should find the same. However, we do have some older servers that we are replacing as part of a normal refresh cycle, so we are also looking to move more of the site to newer SAN-attached servers in the coming months. … We are already running a sizeable chunk of Microsoft.com on the newer version of Hyper-V that ships in Windows Server 2008 R2, and we even have some of our Web servers running on Server Core installations.”
Meanwhile, the Windows Server Division blog has posted some materials intended to help customers learn to love R2. These are guides released in December on topics such as how to migrate supported server roles, data, shares, and operating system settings to Windows Server 2008 R2 and how to configure and manage many Windows Server technologies.
If you are looking for a more objective source of what works/what doesn’t with Windows Server R2, check out the Windows Server 2008 blog written for Microsoft Subnet by Glenn Weadock. Recent topics include Say Goodbye to VPC and VS and Why Not a USB Boot?
