Windows Server 2008 officially went RTM early last month & was at the same time made available for download to all MS customers who have purchased Software Assurance & Microsoft's Certified Partner's.

Now here, in the UAE, the official Launch Date for the product is 27th March 2008 & Microsoft opened up a special offer to a select number of their Partners.

The offer was two-fold:

 

1. All Partners who are able to successfully deploy Windows Server 2008 at a client in the Production Environment BEFORE the Launch Date & submit proof of the same to MS would be Mentioned on a Slide at the Launch Event, with a brief overview of the Partner's business.

2. MS would give out a free Xbox 360 Elite to the first 2 Technical Staff & first 2 Sales Staff of any partner who successfully manage to Deploy or Sell Microsoft Windows Server 2008 to a Client.

Now, I am fortunate enough to have an EA Client who is always looking to improve thier IT Offerings to their User's & reasonably happy to use / test new products in the market, provided they do not interfere with the stability of the existing & critical Infrastructure.

They were using MS Exchange Server 2007 already (without the Unified Messaging Features) & had some spare hardware lying around. Tactfully, I managed to convince them to Deploy Windows Server 2008 in their Environment & use that as the Unified Messaging Server, Primarily for the Exchange Voice Access Feature set. They Agreed.

So whats the low down?

Hardware Used:            HP BL460c Blade Server
Hardware Spec:            2x 3.0Ghz Dual Core Xeon, 2 GB RAM, 2x 146 GB HDD, 2x Gbit LAN
Operating System:        Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition x64
Application Server:        Exchange Server 2007 SP1
Server Role:                  Exchange Unified Messaging Server

The deployment of 2008 was very smoothe, in-fact, it had ALL the required drivers for the hardware I was using natively supported so no need to spend countless hours looking for drivers which may or may not have been released by the manufacturer.

The client uses Symantec Antivirus Enterprise Edition at their site and I had a major fear that this wouldnt work & I would have to scrap the server for it, but this did not affect me as the Vista 64 client for Symantec Antivirus Deployed Seamlessly & is working a treat since.

(Congrats to Symantec / MSFT for the first time I have found third Party AV solution to work with a New O/S right from before the OS is released!)

The new interface takes a bit of getting used to (for users of Vista Basic Theme, this wont be a problem)

Windows Server 2008 ships with ALL the pre-requisites for your Exchange Server 2007 Deployment as native "Add-On" Features, so no need to run backwards & forwards downloading stuff from the Internet.

The Exchange Server Deployment was again Very smooth, telling me at each step precisely which "Features" of Windows Server 2008 I should enable to match the pre-requisites.

Surprisingly, the Windows Server 2008 performs about 70% better when dealing with the Exchange 2007 Management Tools (Both Exchange Management Console & Exchange Management Shell) than the Existing Windows Server 2003 boxes in the Environment which are having 4 GB of RAM & 2x Quad Core Processors (so higher spec hardware).

So far, the Server has now been Running for almost 3 weeks, non-stop, with no indication of any stability issues or performance issues.

My Conclusion: Windows Server 2008 is Definitely a good product & stable enough to go into your production environment. I would, however, not deploy any applications on their (or even consider it) if they have not officially been published as compatible with server 2008.

That being said, all my future networks are going to run Windows 2008 Domain Controllers & Exchange 2007 Servers with Windows 2003 Server ONLY going in on those boxes which explicitly require the O/S version.