SPFoxhole Blog

For those that were at the SharePoint Conference back in March I presented with Joel Oleson and Todd Klindt or to be more exact I performed the demonstrations for this presentation.   I was scheduled to present again at TechEd but due to a scheduling conflict on my end I will be leaving sunny Florida before this session.  One thing I have been meaning to do was put out some posts on the various areas i demonstrated. 

In the accompanying screen cast I am going to give a walkthrough of one of my favorite tools which is the Server Manager.  For those of you that are using Vista are familiar with Computer Manager.  Functional with a nice interface

So if we crack open Windows Server 2008 the one thing I hear alot from people is " Hey look its just Vista with a different name"  So they are right in some aspects.   Alot of the functionality that is in Vista was ported across to Server 2008 its not quite the same.  A noticeable difference is the inclusion of Roles and Features.

Pretty cool huh? Ok so lets go a wee bit deeper and have a look at some of the benefits you will get with Windows Server 2008.  Again this was part of the presentation Joel and I gave so I am grabbing some great bullet points that Joel spoke on.

Management

Enhanced SharePoint Manageability

• · Manage larger deployments easier with user driven, task based consoles with personalized views
• · Achieve higher availability by Identifying and fixing problems quicker with Reliability Manager, Powershell and IIS 7 commandlets with rich diagnostics
• · Automate Remote Configuration to streamline complex multi server and multi farm deployments

Management Features and Enhancements SharePoint People Care About

• · Server Manager
• · Reliability Manager
• · Command line tools WinRM, WinRS
• · Event Viewer
• · Task Manager
• · Schedule Manager
• · Powershell
• · Server Management (700+new settings)
• · Search and filter on settings
• · Create configuration as templates for reuse
• · Windows Hardware Error Architecture

Security

Security Enhancements to SharePoint Deployments

• · You decide what you need, secure by default minimum component install with the essentials
• · Easy to use firewall locked down by default providing reduced attack surface
• · Reduced memory footprint with IIS 7, less is more with only the modules you need

Security Features

• · Firewall
• · Security Configuration Wizard (SCW 2.0)
• · Network Access Protection (NAP)
• · New and Enhanced UI for URLScan in IIS 7 MMC

Performance

SharePoint Enhanced Performance in Windows Server 2008

• · Increased caching and compression with flexible control in your IIS 7 web applications
• · Intelligent, automated tuning of TCP window sizes providing better packet loss resiliency and advanced congestion control for better throughput and faster HTTP and file transfers
• · Loading only the components you need IIS 7 provides lean and mean web application processing

Performance Features

• · New enhanced file transfer features SMB 2.0
• · Next Generation TCP Stack, Optimized for WAN with new Sliding TCP Window Sizing
• · Reduced process and memory footprint with minimal IIS 7 Module loading
• · Native 64-bit support

So now that we have a little background lets take a closer look at some of these mentioned features.   In this demo I will cover the Management features and highlight some of my favorite new tools. 

Windows 2008 Server Manager Demo