Bill Laing just completed his day two keynote presentation, focusing on key technology updates and improvements coming in Windows Server 2008 R2. Not suprisingly, there was a strong emphasis on Hyper-V (Bill was presented his own "can" of Hyper-V near the end of the presentation... He indicated that he preferred water). The most impressive demo involved streaming a media file from a virtual machine, while simultaneously moving a 3GB file to a share on that virtual machine and changing the node of the machine in real time. There was no perceptible loss of quality in the video while these operations were running simultaneously -- an impressive feat, and one that drew a loud cheer from the crowd. Immediately the machine was moved back to the original node, again with no loss of quality in the video, and not causing any problems for the large file that was still copying.

SQL Server code-name "Kilimanjaro" was also demonstrated, with an emphasis on expanded support for logical processing units. Currently, SQL supports up to 64 logical processors -- Kilimanjaro will support up to 256 logical processors. A compelling demo of this functionality showed high end servers from HP and IBM running SQL on 256 logical processors at once, all with balanced load. It was quite a site to see all 256 processors appearing in the Task Manager. The Kilimanjaro release is scheduled to ship around the same time as Server 2008 R2.

Bill demonstrated one of the ways that Windows 7 clients will "light-up" when working with Windows Server 2008.  A new technology called "branch caching" enables remote work sites (i.e. satellite offices), esp. those operating in low bandwidth conditions to speed up network operations by caching files on local machines in the satellite office. Files are subsequently served from machines on the the local network rather than going out over the wire to the main office. The demo of this technology was impressive -- a 1.5 mb file that otherwise took 20 seconds to download over a 512kb DSL line downloaded and opened instantly in the branch cache scenario, since the file was served up by another client that already had a copy of the file. You can read more about the BranchCache in the Developer Guide for Windows 7, here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Win7DeveloperGuide.

Bill's speech has already been posted to the WinHEC site, and can be viewed here: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/winhec/default.mspx.

For more information on the forthcoming R2 release of Windows Server, visit http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/default.aspx.

Keith Boyd, Sr. Content Publishing Manager [MSFT]