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Executive Summary: In an exclusive interview, Bill Laing, general manager of Microsoft’s Windows Server division, discusses key Windows Server 2008 features, commenting candidly about features that surprised him, technology that might be hard for some users, and lessons Microsoft learned from this release. |
In Windows Server history, each release has been notable for some key technology. Windows 2000 Server was the Active Directory (AD) release. Windows Server 2003 was the security release.
When planning began for Longhorn Server (now Windows Server 2008), Microsoft was preoccupied with Linux. Consequently, the original plans lacked significant innovation: Longhorn Server was an unexciting revision of Windows 2003 with some manageability enhancements. As time passed, the corresponding Longhorn client (now Windows Vista) release continuously slipped, holding back Longhorn Server.
Finally, in 2005, because the original features conceived for Longhorn Server were finished (and to appease Software Assurance customers) Microsoft announced a new cadence of a “minor” release to follow two years after each “major” release such as Windows 2003. The result was Windows Server 2003 R2. R2 was notable for clearing the stage so that the actual Longhorn release could introduce some really interesting technology: Server 2008 debuts a new roles-based management paradigm enabled by componentization of the OS; but the features this release will be notable for are Server Core and native virtualization, Hyper-V (code-named Veridian).
Just as each Server release has been noted for a technology, so has each release’s development been led by a Microsoft engineer. Windows NT was fathered by Dave Cutler. Win2K finally shipped thanks to Brian Valentine. Windows 2003 bears the imprint of Dave Thompson. Responsibility for Server 2008 rests on Bill Laing, general manager of the Windows Server division.
In a recent conversation, Laing discussed Server 2008’s evolution, candidly commenting about the development of key features, lessons learned, what he thinks might be hard for some users, and what surprised him.
The Role of Roles
Forster: What were your goals for Server 2008?
Laing: We always have the basic goals of improving reliability, security, scalability,
but the notion of role-based deployment was a big change for Windows. We
wanted the server so you could configure it by role, or by workload. The big Aha!
moment was that customers actually say “roles.” We didn’t make that word up; it
Forster: Didn’t Windows 2003 start moving toward
roles?
Laing: We had Manage Your Server and Configure Your
Server, but it wasn’t a natural tool you left up the whole
time. Now we literally don’t include the bits for undeployed
roles in the directory. They’re on the disk, but
if you don’t install the role, the code for that role is not
even there.
Forster: What are the implications of role-based deployment?
Laing: The way I think about it is you’re reducing the
surface area, which helps you with management because
you’re only exposing the things you need for the role. If
you don’t install Media Player, you don’t have to pay any
attention to it—whether it’s managing it, or patching it,
or whatever. I think of how easy it is with Windows 2003
to turn on File Server. Well, now you have to consciously
go through the act of creating a file server role. You’re not
accidentally going to create shares, for example.
Forster: Do roles enhance security?
Laing: I’d love to claim it makes Windows Server more secure. It’s a tough thing to claim. But there are
fewer moving parts. So the surface area has
come down and it should improve security.
Server Core
Forster: The most important innovation is
probably Server Core, the stripped-down
version of the OS with no GUI. How did
Server Core happen?
Laing: Customers told us they wanted it—
and I was pleasantly surprised at how much
we were able to do in a first release. Actually,
the people who had started doing the initial
work came from the Embedded Systems
group. They’d been thinking about Windows
in embedded environments. They’d been
doing a lot of analysis and had done maps of
different layers of the OS.
Forster: Untangling the dependencies within
Windows Server must have been daunting.
How did you deal with that?
Laing? When we initially went into componentization,
naively, we thought there
would be maybe 2,000 components in the OS
and we’d just pick and choose the ones we
wanted. The problem is you have to test all
the ways the components can be combined,
so you really have to choose fairly big building
blocks. It was clear to me that we could
only manage a few layers initially.
Forster: What were the challenges of applying
the Embedded Systems team’s work to
Windows Server?
Laing: If you build an embedded OS, it’s
deployed in the context of, say, a Point of
Sales terminal. It’s not some general-purpose
thing like an OS that then gets deployed
in many scenarios. The people building
the terminal can choose their components,
integrate the system, and that’s it. So we
walked this fine line between how many
components do you want and the complexity
problem that occurs because components
can be assembled in different ways. That’s
why we went for Core, plus—as we used
to call it—ROS (Rest of the OS), which was
the next building block. That was the difference
between Server Core, and then Server
without the roles, and then each role being
separate, and then ideally each feature.
Hyper-V
Forster: Hyper-V was a late addition and
actually isn’t a finished part of this release \[As I wrote this article, a beta
of Hyper-V had shipped in
December and another beta
was scheduled to ship with
Server 2008, with the final
Hyper-V set to release within
180 days.\] How did Hyper-V
come about?
Laing: Around late 2003, we
acquired Connectix (Virtual
Server and Virtual PC). At
that time, people thought of
virtualization as an option
rather than a core strategy
for the company. The initial
model was to add Virtual
Server 2005 R2 to provide a
virtual hosting model. Then came research
groups, such as Xen (we actually contributed
research into Xen), and the hypervisor
model. And the semiconductor industry
was developing enhancements to support
virtualization. We said, “That’s a core feature
of the OS.” That was the change in our
thinking—that virtualization was a core feature
of the OS.
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Forster: Will Hyper-V drive demand for
Server 2008?
Laing: Oh, yeah, I think it will. That’s probably
the main new thing—most other things
that we’ve done are somewhat evolutionary.
That’s a big-ticket item that people will go for.
And the fact that we support Windows 2003
and Red Hat and SUSE Linux on Hyper-V
makes it interesting.
Lessons Learned
Forster: What lessons will you take from this
release?
Laing: Betas are important, but you don’t
get deep insight back from betas. If you do
stupid things and you have obvious bugs,
you get feedback. But we got most out of deep
engagements: TAP \[the Technology Adoption
Program\], the EEC \[Enterprise Engineering
Center\]. In fact, I would increase our investment
in those kinds of programs over time
because it’s a very rich interaction. \[For details
about the EEC, see “What You Need to Know
About the Microsoft Enterprise Engineering
Center,” July 2003, InstantDoc ID 39163.\]
Another lesson is that you have to be flexible and have a structure that lets you add or remove things—like it was pretty seamless to add virtualization to the plan. It was technically a lot of hard work, but it impacted the virtualization team, the Server Manager team, and overall project management, but that was about it.
Forster: What will be hard
for users to learn in this
release?
Laing: Server Core has had a
lot of positive feedback, but
I wonder how many people
are really used to having no
GUI—just command-line
scripting of everything. Certainly
a group of hard-core
people will love it, and we’ll get better as we
get PowerShell on it.
Forster: What surprised you about this
release?
Laing: I was very surprised how popular the
RODC \[read-only domain controller\] is, and
that came from people pushing it in directions
I didn’t expect. I had a narrow picture
of it at the beginning: It was interesting for
branches, basically. But people have been
pushing it into the front-end Web server so
they can push policy out of it. It surprised
me how popular that was because it’s a
complicated thing to do and a lot of people
are deploying that.
Perspective
Windows 2000 was notable for AD. But
industry old-timers also remember it as the
long-delayed, not-Windows-NT-5.0 release.
Thanks to Vista, the Longhorn release cycle
will be recalled as suffering from delays
and do-overs. But Server 2008 benefited
from market developments over the past
five years as Microsoft dealt with its Linux
paranoia and recognized virtualization’s significance.
Nobody will remember Windows
2003 R2 (the original vision for Longhorn),
but Server 2008 will be noted as the Server
Core and virtualization release. Sometimes
delay is a good thing.