During our Windows 7 and Server 2008R2 day with Matt McSpirit, he covered some excellent features in both Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2, after my previous post about the neat stuff in 7, here’s some of the things in server 2008R2 that really grabbed our attention on the day.

Boot from VHD

Love this feature, real clever, this allows you to boot your Windows server from a VHD image, so your virtual image actually boots on the physical tin. think it through, means if you ever decide you want your virtual machine on tin, then just boot away, plus you only have to have one server image, regardless of it been deployed on hardware or virtually. just how clever is that!

Core Parking

Liked this little feature to. allows Windows to be clever enough to know, that if its not using some of the processor cores then it can let them go to sleep. has the potential to save power and costs, not earth shattering amounts, but to coin a well known supermarket phrase, every little helps and as servers with increasing amounts of cores are common place, if you can use them more effectively, this can only be a good thing.

Remote Desktop Services

This is a mix of enhancements (and rebranding of terminal services) to the standard terminal services, as well as the addition of native Virtual Desktop functionality.

with improved user experience, allowing virtualised presentation of video and audio through to the client device.

the addition of a connection broker allowing for virtual desktop delivery straight from hyper-v, with no need for a bolt on application to make it work.

massive all around functionality improvements check out here for more enhancements http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/R2-virtualization.aspx

Hyper-V R2

Lots of the excitement around R2 are the enhancements to Hyper-V and especially the functionality that is also available in the freebie Hyper-V R2 Server.

The addition of Live Migration for those who want to move virtual workloads between servers without down time.

addition of the cluster shared volume, allowing multiple VM’s to sit on a volume, but having control over which server in the cluster mounts any VM, as all servers can truly share the volume.

Redirected I/O this is real neat as well, with the ability for hyper-v to add extra resilience by making its own intelligent calls on how to route traffic in the event of a component failure.

For much more on hyper-v http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/hyperv-overview.aspx

Better together

as with the earlier BLOG there’s lots of stuff in there that when you throw Windows 7 into the mix, you add even more value, Direct Access, Branch Cache, RDP v 7, all add lots of value and business benefits.

What I really like about Microsoft’s recent software releases is that there has been lots of thought into adding benefits and value, looking at user problems and coming up with ways to fix them that are ingenious and innovative.

these releases of Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 carry that on in my opinion.

check out Microsoft’s sites if you want to try this stuff yourself the RC’s are still there for download.

Technet and VL customers will have the releases over the next few weeks.