I’ve been using a Windows Server 2008 R2 RC test server at work for about a month or 2 now, although I haven’t really tested out any features at all on that. I purely installed it to setup our development (will eventually be live) Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 Enterprise, which is running as a VM on top of Hyper-V. This is because we will be implementing Windows 2008 R2 (and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2) as our hyper-visor, purely based on financial reasons. If you purchase Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise, you can run it as the hyper-visor and 4 fully licensed versions of itself as Virtual Machines on top. As we are a 100% Microsoft Environment, it works out to be more cost effective than even running an alternative free hyper-visor (although you can also get Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 for free!).

So after server 2008 R2 reached RTM a couple of weeks ago, I upgraded my home server with a Intel Q9550 CPU, 8GB of Memory and set the 3 WD 640GB Caviar Black HDDs to a Raid 0 stripe (with an eSata drive to backup the array regularly of course!). I installed 2008 R2 Enterprise on there with no hiccups what so ever, I was impressed as it is a “white box” server with all consumer grade parts.

I’m using the main server purely as a hyper-visor currently, so I then setup my basic network infrastructure with VMs. I really must do a post solely on that, the way the network actually all works with the VM’s and my setup is pretty impressive, even if I do so say so myself! But it definitely needs some diagrams to make sense. None-the-less, here are the main VMs I setup:

• Windows Server 2003 R2 Router – Running Bandwidth Controller Enterprise, all traffic from the local network > internet passes through here for QoS prioritisation and throttling. This also acts as a secondary DNS server.
• Windows Server 2008 R2 – Domain Controller, with DNS & DHCP
• Windows Server 2008 R2 – This is my “Power Server”, it gets the majority of CPU, Mem and HDD resources. It runs Exchange 2007 SP1, File Server, Media Server, Remote Desktop Services, Windows Deployment Services.

So far I’ve been very impressed with 2008 R2, the performance has been fantastic and everything has been very reliable. Previously (as I run all Windows 7 clients on my network) I had some issues with Server 2003 R2 crashing with DNS and File Access issues, as well as slow performance with Windows 7. These issues are now a thing of the past, with everything being rock solid thus far.

Promoting a member server to a Domain Controller is easier than ever; dcpromo.exe took care of everything in the world, you don’t even need to have DNS enabled etc like with 2003, it will just do it all for you.

I’ve also been playing around with Windows Deployment Services to deploy Windows 7 over the network. This was very simple to setup and I was deploying images in around 5-10 minutes without any prior experience with WDS. I’m now playing around with adding in driver packages as well as creating custom images. It has been great so far and I plan to use the feature a lot, as it will be an important skill set to have at work.

So overall, I haven’t delved particularly deep into Windows Server 2008 R2, but have played around with most of the features. So far it has performed flawlessly for me and I have nothing bad to report…well except for my Exchange 2007 SP1 install, but that’s really a downfall of the Exchange installer and not Server 2008 R2. I’ll be sure to post up some tutorials on any speed bumps I encounter and how to tackle them.