Windows Server 2008 Release Due By ChristmasWindows Server 2008 Release Due By Christmas

Microsoft will release Windows Server 2008 R2 sometime in the fourth quarter, the company said Monday at its annual TechEd event for IT professionals.

The company also announced that a test release of the next version of SQL Server would be available for limited release in the second half of this year, and it detailed new features for each.

The near-final release candidate version of Windows Server 2008 R2, made available for download last week, includes a number of new features. At Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference last October, the company announced that Windows Server's Hyper-V virtualization would support up to 32 logical processors, but Microsoft has now bumped that number to 64 for companies looking for more virtual machine density.

Virtualization improvements are among the key new features of Windows Server 2008 R2. Another new feature, Processor Compatibility Mode, will allow Windows Server instances to move between machines with different CPU types. That will improve the usability of one of Windows Server 2008 R2's other new features, live migration of virtual machines.

"One of the iniquities with our clustering solution today is all of the nodes in a cluster need to have an identical CPU type in order to live migrate a VM from one machine to another," Ward Ralston, Microsoft's Windows Server group product manager, said in an interview.

One new feature, the File Classification Infrastructure, gives IT pros the ability to automatically classify files and set policies for those files based on their type. For example, companies could set all documents with the term "Internal Use Only" in them as a type named "secret," and set specific security and backup policies based on that classification. Companies could allow employees to classify files. Another set of files, possibly classified as something like "low business value," could be set to automatically delete a year after creation. File Classification Infrastructure integrates with SharePoint, so employees can set classification themselves on documents they upload, and Microsoft plans to allow third-party developers and software companies to plug into File Classification Infrastructure itself. IT pros and employees can classify files on a per-file basis, a per-folder basis, or even based on search functionality that looks for specific strings of data within a file.

Microsoft will likely push organizations to deploy Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 together, and will strike that "better together" tone in its TechEd keynote. The company said that one early tester, small consulting company Convergent Computing, has been implementing features called Direct Access (which allows easier access to the corporate network without a VPN connection) and Branch Cache (which acts similar to WAN optimization technology) that both require Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, has reduced network bandwidth by 43% in order to save $23,000 a year, and has gotten rid of its VPN concentrator and the software related to it in order to save $40,000 annually.

Microsoft also announced that it would release a limited test version of SQL Server 2008 R2, formerly code-named SQL Server "Kilimanjaro," in the second half of 2009. The company has already said the database software will be released in 2010.

Among the features in SQL Server 2008 R2 will be Master Data Services, which can aggregate and match related data across an organization to give a company a single look of disparate data in order to help businesses reconcile differences in the data and enforce data quality rules. That feature is based on technology acquired when Microsoft bought Stratature in 2007 and is part of functionality formerly code-named "Bulldog."

Another new feature in SQL Server 2008 R2 will be called Application and Multi-Server Management, which simplifies the process of deploying and managing software across multiple instances of SQL Server. Today, much of that process is manual, but this feature introduces a graphical user interface to do so.

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