Version 2 of Windows Home Server, Vail is based on Windows Server 2008 R2. It provides features such as simple file sharing, remote access, expandable storage, backup and internal\external media streaming. Vail also comes equipped with an application catalogue and product wide extensibility model. This means that new services like AV, online sharing, and home automation easily added and integrated into the solution. Vail will be available in preinstalled form or as a software package for those who want to build there own.

Vail will also support some Windows 7 technologies like "PlayTo" that supports the streaming of digital media to DNLA enabled devices, and home group fro the support of simple file sharing. Remote streaming is supported via Silverlight, meaning that users can access their media over the internet. Making it readily available. File types that will be support in RTM are MPEG-4, 3GP, H.264, ADTS, AVI, MPEG-2, AAC, MP3, LPCM and MPEG-1. AC3. The public preview version wont support MPEG-2 and AC3 however. System requirements aren?t too demanding, with a minimum of 1GB of RAM and 160GB HDD.

MS has repackaged their Windows Terminal Services. Aimed at students, it offers a thin-client platform on Server 2008 R2. Renamed Windows multi point server 2010.

This system, which was announced last year, allows 10 PCs to connect to a host. The host runs Multi Point via remote desktop services (WTS). Microsoft have dubbed Multi Point Server their flagship product in this range, which also includes Mouse Mischief and Multi Point Mouse SDK.

However the platform can only pr obtained via OEMs or MS’s Academic VL program.

The platform has been delivered in response to the demand for more modern and cost effective computing systems within education.

In recent years MS has certainly been pushing to make Windows more accessible to Educational Institutions with lower prices and large discounts to students on Windows 7.

But there is a catch. Multi Point does restrict the end user experience. There will be no Media centre, No Windows Flip, task bar previews or Aero.

So, all this will also set up a new generation of computer users, and clearly a growing market as computing systems become more integral to educational Institutions. But? a growing market means competition, and the restrictions MultiPoint pose will surely open the door for Apple and Linux.

Active Directory:
Active Directory will now appear in DPM as a resource available for protection.

Exchange Server:
Support for Exchange 2010
Better support for mailbox level restores (Brick level – previously needed a third party app for this)

Hyper-V:
File level backup and restore of files within guests (Back up the files in a VM thats backed up)
Recover to other Hyper-v nodes
Support of Live Migration clusters

SQL:
Backup full SQL instances
Autodiscover of DBs within these instances (Great if you ad a DB and dont config it to backup, gets done for you)

SharePoint:
Support of new versions of Sharepoint and Office Server (Not sure what yet)
Autodiscovery of new content DBs on certain

What I want to cover very quickly is something that might be of use to any SME with Exchange that has thought about implementing a Highly Available solution. Lets face it, once we heard about clustering.. we all thought.. would that help my business? How difficult is this? and of course.. how much would it cost? No matter what size your business is, email is (for most) absolutley critical and whatever we can do to protect that service from failure is a worthwhile consideration.

Before the advent of HYPER-V, in order to get full redundancy for Exchange Server you would need to have 7 seperate servers. 2 for Active Directory and DNS, 1 For File and print, 2 for Client Access Services and Hub roles and another 2 servers running the mailbox mode in a CCR environment.

Fast forward to today and the exact same level of protection can be delivered with the use of only 3 servers by using Virtualization (Specifically HYPER-V). By anybodys standards thats some kind of improvement.. see the diagram below for the config:

Virtualization is a great buzzword at the moment and has been for a whie now. Whilst many of us know what it is and even how it might be able to help us out in terms of consolidation, cost vs capacity, IT support and of course the age old justification process for when we are buying new kit on which to run these systems. Many people still don’t know a great deal about some of the great tools available for helping us out with the installation and implementation process.

For a while now we have been using a product called System Centre Virtual Machine Manager (Microsoft). We started out using the initial 2007 base product and are currently using the latest SCVMM 2008 R2 release. I have lead most of our virtualization projects here at PhillipsTaylorBrown and have looked at most of the tools available and tried most of them at some point or another (Sometimes with a great deal of frustration!).After using some of the more readily available tools I think its safe to say that with SCVMM 2008 R2.. Microsoft absolutley nailed it, for an off the shelf product they have really done a great job with this one!

Let me tell you why:

one size fits all! – well, its about as close to that as you expect from software. SCVMM works with HYPER-V on windows Server, Windows Server HYPER-V (remember these are 2 different offerings, albeit with the same hypervisor), VMware ESX, ESXi, all the way to vSphere 4 (although not officially supported it seems fine), Microsoft Virtual Server (MSVS). Soon we will have support for Citrix/Xen too! All the major platforms catered for so only one managment and impementation solution required.

Its fast. There are a few tools out there that will work very well in certain situations and are, if we are being honest pretty good and great value for money, but the price you pay is performance. Which doesn’t sound too bad until you have to virtualize a server (or several) holding a lot of data. Then that ‘simple P2V’operation takes hours and hours. What if its mission critical? What if it goes wrong and you have to start over? – SCVMM gets around this by using the volume shadow copy service and as such runs that bit quicker but with the added advantage of not interrupting the source server, making the operation pretty slick with very little (minutes) of downtime.

Exchange Backup Functionality:
Exchange Server 2007 SP2 includes a new VSS plug-in for Windows Server Backup to support Exchange backups. Once you install SP2 you can use the standard Windows backup tool to backup and restore your Exchnage 2007 databases. The new VSSplugin is a single .EXE file called WBBExchange.exe and is automatically installed by SP2 on all Exchange 2007 Servers with the mailbox role installed.

Enhancments to the Auditing system:
There is a new Exchange Auditing events and audit log repository that allows admins to audit the key events relating to their Exchnage servers more easily. This dedicated audit log repository provides much more granularity and performance over exiting methods.

Public Folder Quota Management:
Added cmdlets now allow for easier management of Public folders. These new cmdlets remove the dependancy on the old public folder distributed authoring and versioning administration tools.

Centralised Organisational Settings:
A number of new cmdlet parameters have been added to assist in the management of a number of Exchange organisation settings, these include the following.

• Add-AvailabilityAddressSpace
• Export-Mailbox
• Import-Mailbox
• Move-Mailbox
• New-ActiveSyncVirtualDirectory
• New-ManagedFolder
• Restore-Mailbox
• Set-ActiveSyncVirtualDirectory
• Set-CASMailbox
• Set-IMAPSettings
• Set-OABVirtualDirectory
• Set-OrganizationConfig
• Set-POPSettings
• Set-PublicFolder
• Set-TransportConfig
• Test-ActiveSyncConnectivity
• Test-OwaConnectivity
• Test-WebServicesConnectivity