Welcome!

Welcome to the Microsoft Windows Server Performance team blog! As the Group Program Manager for the team, I’m delighted to introduce the team and provide the first post to kick off the blog.

The Windows Server Performance team is a part of the Core Operating System Division at Microsoft. Our charter is to understand and improve the performance of Windows Server. As a matter of engineering, the sort of work we do involves:

· Measurement of performance;

· Analysis to identify bottlenecks;

· Identification and implementation of architectural and code changes to improve performance; and

· To close the loop, verification that the changes we made, did what we expected them to do J

The work gives us an opportunity to see the OS as a whole, and to study the interaction between software components and between hardware and software.

We tend to focus on core scenarios and capabilities in Windows Server (other teams focus on role-specific performance), and look for ways to improve efficiency and scalability. Some of the areas we cover (and will post about) are virtualization, multi-core/multi-proc scalability, file systems (local and remote), network and disk I/O, and server power. We also plan to discuss OS and server application performance in general, and to share some of what we have learnt over the years.

We’ve already published v1.0 of our performance tuning whitepaper for Windows Server 2008 https://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/Perf_tun_srv.mspx - have a look and give us feedback (there’s a feedback link in the document). We will also be doing a Server 2008 performance webcast on Feb 8th to talk directly about the performance features and improvements in Server 2008.

Additionally, we’ll have some of the team on hand & presenting at the joint launch of Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 in Los Angeles on February 27th. See the launch site for more detail. We hope to see you there!

We are all looking forward to the day when everyone has the opportunity to use the next major release of our OS.

Thanks,
Bill Karagounis
Group Program Manager
Windows Server Performance Team