BANGALORE, INDIA: Microsoft released R2 Beta of Windows 2008 Server in April. The new version has many enhancements including new versions of Hyper-V, IIS and enhanced support for Windows 7. Here we take a look at some of the new features present in it.

Virtualization improvements
Hyper-V was one of the most talked about features of Windows 2008. In R2 too, Hyper-V gets a new version. New version of Hyper-V has support for Live Migration, which allows movement of VMs between two physical server without any downtime.

Live migration utilizes a new feature in R2 Beta called Cluster Shared Volumes in failover clustering. According to MS, these CSV volumes allow multiple nodes in a failover cluster to access same Logical unit number at the same time.

Terminal Services gets a new name in 2008 R2 Beta -Remote Desktop Services (RDS). In R2 Beta, RDS RemoteApp provides Presentation virtualization which creates a virtualized environment in which processing of an application can be isolated from I/O and graphics, and application can be controlled from another location.

In other virtualization improvements, Hyper-V2.0 now have support for 32 processors and also making a comeback in is the hot addition and removal of Virtual hard disks from Virtual machines. Also new version of Hyper-V has support for Second Level Address Translation,TCP Offload and Jumbo Frames.

New configuration editor in IIS7.5 allows users to edit configuration of web application.

IIS
A new version of IIS too is shipped with Windows 2008 R2. New version IIS 7.5 comes with many enhancements which aim to make deployment and management of Web applications easier.It has a PowerShell snap-in which allows administrators to script most commonly performed management tasks. Also included are IIS-specific cmdlets which make adding,deleting and modification of sites and applications easier.