The next version of Windows Server, Windows Server 2008 R2 will be available soon as a platform in our managed server hosting offering. It is believed Microsoft will release it to manufacturing (RTM) it on July 13th. Soon after that the hardware OEM’s will get it to develop their new products. The new server operating system will then generally available on October 22nd. Thanks to C Infinity’s leading edge deployment solution and our involvement with new products, it will be available to our customers immediately after its release to the public.
There will be a number of benefits for those in the online business in Windows Server 2008 R2:
- Hyper-V, the Microsoft virtualisation solution that C Infinity has been using with great success, will be upgraded to offer better performance, lower power consumption and even higher uptimes than we’ve already been experiencing.
- IIS, the web platform, is upgraded from IIS7 to IIS7.5. This includes FTP 7.5, WebDAV 7.5, improved FastCGI and a new Best Practices Analyser. Script junkies will also get a new PowerShell cmdlet set for managing their web servers.
It is important to note that Windows Server 2008 R2 will only be available as a 64 bit product. X86 or 32bit installations will not be possible. It will be possible to upgrade from 64 bit installations of older versions of Windows Server. However it will not be possible to do an in-place upgrade from a 32 bit operating system to a 64 bit one.
Want to know what architecture your Windows Server operating system is? Look for a folder called C:\Program Files (x86). This indicates a 64 bit operating system has been installed.
C Infinity offers the Services Provider License Agreement (SPLA) for licensing for Microsoft products. This means that not only can you increase/decrease your spend according to your usage, you can upgrade to the latest operating systems and applications as soon as they are available. Existing customers will be able to upgrade to W2008 R2 once it is available, depending on the conditions of their contract, e.g. BizSpark.
Please feel free to contact C Infinity if you have any questions.
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