Server 2008 R2 – Server Core changes.

As I said in my last post I have a whole stack of things to talk about in the aftermath of Tech.ed in Barcelona. One of those is the changes made in server core.

Fortunately Andrew over at the Windows Server Core blog has saved me a job, his post has more detail,  but the major change is a subset of .NET framework for core. This allows two really important things. PowerShell 2 and ASP.NET. Today Server core has no .NET framework support so that means ASP or plain HTML pages, but no ASP.NET.  ASP.NET is a obviously a step forward because you shouldn’t really have to care if a web server is on Core or on Full Windows when you decide what it will serve up. But PowerShell ? I keep telling people that you manage Windows Server Core remotely. You don’t logon to the console and fire up PowerShell….but with PowerShell 2 we have much richer remoting, and remotely managing a machine with PowerShell means you run the shell on Machine A and specify that you want to run a command on Machine B.

We also have File Server Resource Manager support, and the ability to add Certificate Services. Finally. Server 2008 R2 is 64 bit only, support 32 bit application will be available but the plan is that you will have to choose to install it, to keep the footprint as small as possible.

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