Windows Server 2008 is the latest Windows Server operating system. With Server 2008 you can develop, deliver, and manage rich user experiences and applications, provide a highly secure network infrastructure, and increase technological efficiency and value within your organization. Windows Server 2008 has many new features and also improves on the existing features of previous server operating systems. Here are some of the highlights.
Windows Server Hyper-V allows you to make the best use of your server hardware investments by consolidating multiple server roles as separate virtual machines running on a single physical machine. You can also run multiple operating systems such as Windows, Linux, and others all in parallel on a single server.
Web Applications and Hosting
Windows Server 2008 comes with Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS 7.0), a Web server and security enhanced, easy to manage platform for developing and reliably hosting Web applications and services.
High Performance Computing
High Performance Computing (HPC) instead uses the processing power of multiple systems to process the commands for an application. It does this by distributing the processing load across multiple systems to allow for faster processing of the data. Windows HPC Server 2008 is built on Windows Server 2008 and can efficiently scale to thousands of processing cores to improve the productivity, and reduce the complexity of your HPC environment.
High Security
Windows Server 2008 has been hardened to help protect against failure and several new technologies help prevent unauthorized connections to your networks, servers, data, and user accounts.
Server Core Installation
The Server Core installation option of the Windows Server 2008 operating system provides a minimal environment for running specific server roles that reduces the maintenance and management requirements for those server roles. To provide this minimal environment, a Server Core installation installs only the subset of the binaries that are required by the supported server roles.
Windows Server 2008 will be released with 8 editions which include:
Windows Server 2008 Standard
Windows Server 2008 Enterprise
Windows Server 2008 Datacenter
Windows Web Server 2008
Windows Server 2008 for Itanium-Based Systems
Windows Server 2008 Standard without Hyper-V
Windows Server 2008 Enterprise without Hyper-V
Windows Server 2008 Datacenter without Hyper-V
System Requirements
Processor
Minimum: 1 GHz (x86) or 1.4 GHz (x64)
Recommended: 2 GHz or faster
An Intel Itanium 2 processor is required for Windows Server 2008 for Itanium-Based Systems
Memory
Minimum: 512 MB RAM
Recommended: 2 GB RAM or greater
Maximum (32-bit systems): 4 GB (Standard) or 64 GB (Enterprise and Datacenter)
Maximum (64-bit systems): 32 GB (Standard) or 2 TB (Enterprise, Datacenter, and Itanium-Based Systems)
Disk Space
Minimum: 10 GB
Recommended: 40 GB or greater
