Subtitles of the Movie

So when you first hear the term Windows Server 2008, I'm sure one of the first things you think is okay, what's the big deal this time? What's happened to the operating system that's so great and new and wonderful? Let's just go through some of the kind of high level things that have changed in Windows Server 2008 and then of course we'll dig into these in a lot more detail as we go through the course. First off, Microsoft had 3 main priorities with Windows Server 2008. The first one was easier maintenance and management. The second one was easier maintenance and management, and you know where I'm headed here, the third one, easier maintenance and management. Now, as the corporate networking landscape has changed drastically over the last few years, due to Internet, due to the explosion of data storage and so forth, the use of XML to transfer data quickly and easily between platforms, the servers had been carrying the load. Now, there have been some significant architectural changes under the hood on Windows Server 2008. Some of them you're going to notice, some of them you're going to not notice, okay? Or you will not notice. Maybe that's the better way to say that. For the most part, your Administrative Tools have not changed, they have been enhanced, especially you'll see a lot more wizards, a lot more enhancements within the wizards, but the big thing is Microsoft has come to understand, based on a bunch of surveys that there was a huge administrator workload imbalance, okay, and this is not going to surprise anybody who's been in the Microsoft world for very long. Up to 70 percent of the average network administrator's time was spent applying service packs, doing patch installation and bizarre little management tasks on the servers. And so Microsoft really targeted those things and wanted to get that down. One of the things they've done is they've added a new Server Manager. Now, this is one administrative tool, administrators have been screaming for this since back in the NT days and they've gotten better every time. We're still using the Microsoft Management Console, I'll show you that a little later on, but, all of the administrative tools are in one MMC now and it's actually implemented in a very graphical way, it doesn't look like a standard MMC, it kind of does, but you'll see it a little bit later on. But this is if you've ever worked on SBS, Microsoft's Small Business Server product, you've already seen the Server Manager. But this thing was really cool in SBS and they've now pulled it over into the Windows Server 2008 world. Now, security has changed again. They've enhanced the security again thanks to our new developing changing world with Internet. Now when you install a Windows Server 2008 box, it has no functionality okay? It is a bare bones install and you have to go tell it what roles you want it to go execute. Then, once you tell it what kind of role you want it to execute, now you have to tell it what kind of features inside that role you want it to execute. So, you'll see that. Then, you'll also find out that now there's the ability to do what are called granular policies. We can have multiple password policies in a single domain for example because a lot of times now, it's hard to apply one password policy across an entire domain of users. Deployment has become much faster and much much easier. This will make the course worth it worth it for you, okay? Simple fact, you put the installation disc in, you answer a few questions, and you can leave it alone. You no longer have to answer a bunch of questions in the middle, so the installation won't run for 30 minutes and then stop, and you have to answer questions and then it will run for 10 or 15 minutes more and then you'll have to answer questions. Answer the questions up front, go do something else, 45 minutes later you're installed, you're rebooted, you're ready to go, much much better. Microsoft enhanced Network Services, they've totally rewritten the TCP/IP stack for one good reason, they now have IP version 6 support. We'll talk about that quite a bit later on in the course, that's huge. Next up, Active Directory continues to be enhanced, one really cool feature, you can restart Active Directory without rebooting the server. Now that means any other roles in the server, DNS, DHCP, all that, they all keep running. We just restart Active Directory when we've made any kind of changes. Virtualization, this is the big buzz word nowadays in the server world and Microsoft is bringing virtualization into the operating system. We'll talk about it a little bit, this is to control hardware cost and to take care of some of those maintenance issues we talked about a little earlier, so you can see, Microsoft's done a lot to this operating system. We'll go through these individually, we'll take a closer look at each one of them and I think you're going to like what you see.