Windows Vista + Windows Server 2008 = Great IT

I was perusing the Windows Server 2008 Launch site and came across this list of things that make your IT estate the envy of your peers by using Vista on the desktop and Server 2008 in the back office.  It kicked off by talking about how Vista and Server 2008 came from the same family and has shared code etc.  I guess you might call them siblings?

"Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 originally began as part of a single development project, and as such they share a number of new technologies across networking, storage, security and management. Although the development of Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 have branched into separate releases with different release cycles, many of these enhancements apply to both Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. When organizations deploy both operating systems, they will see how the combined client-server infrastructure provides even greater advantages."

Features

IT professionals who are administering a Windows Vista / Windows Server 2008 infrastructure will notice many improvements in how they control and manage their environment.

  • Maintenance is greatly simplified by the use of a single model for updates and service packs across client and server.
  • Client computers can monitor for specific events and forward to Windows Server 2008 for centralized monitoring and reporting.
  • Windows Deployment Services provides much faster and more reliable operating system deployment.
  • Network Access Protection features on Windows Server 2008 ensure that Windows Vista clients connecting to the network are compliant with security policies and restricted from accessing network resources if not.

The reliability, scalability, and overall responsiveness of the infrastructure are greatly increased by improvements made to both Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.

  • Clients can render print jobs locally before sending them to print servers to reduce the load on the server and increase its availability.
  • Server resources are cached locally so that they are available even if the server is not, with copies automatically updating when the client and server are reconnected.
  • Applications or scripts that need to run on both client and server can take advantage of the Transactional File System to reduce the risk of error during file and registry operations and roll back to a known good state in the event of failure or cancellation.
  • Policies can be created to ensure greater Quality of Service for certain applications or services that require prioritization of network bandwidth between client and server.

Windows Vista clients connecting to networks where Windows Server 2008 has been deployed can experience greatly improved communication speeds and reliability.

  • Searching Windows Server 2008 servers from a Windows Vista client avails of enhanced indexing and caching technologies on both to provide huge performance gains across the enterprise.
  • Native IPv6 support across all client and server services creates a more scalable and reliable network, while the rewritten TCP/IP stack makes network communication much faster and more efficient.
  • The new Server Message Block 2.0 protocol provides a number of communication enhancements, including greater performance when connecting to file shares over high-latency links and better security through the use of mutual authentication and message signing.
  • Terminal Services on Windows Server 2008 have many improvements, including providing Windows Vista clients with remote access to internal resources through an HTTP gateway and seamless remote applications that run as if on the local desktop.