Things i was really hoping for in Windows 8 server… or a future version ?

Windows “8” server beta got released the other day, as im sure every nerd-type person knows…

There are some cool features in the beta release, around Hyper-V in particular…. as usual (for me) – i always focus on the other stuff that could be in there…. (its not a good personaility trait – i am aware of this!)

Anyhoo – incase anyone out there is listening…. (unlikely i know)

– The biggest thing i want is either a tool or supported method of collapsing forest-root domains. These are everywhere thanks to Microsofts poor documentation around this area and over-confident, under-skilled consultants back in the Windows 2000 days. Forest root domains are a fucking cancer – and serve no purpose in many organisations than being a pain in the arse. Having to perform a domain migration for this isnt necessarily an option in a number of places… and while ive done more inter-forest migrations than i count these days… they;re never nice.

– Group policy consilidation – give us a tool to consolidate muitple GPO’s… a lack of understanding of how to effectively use group policies means that many times, companies have hundreds of GPO’s when they only need 10-20.

– DAG everything. Exchange 2010 DAG’s are fucking awesome. (i like them a little) – giving us fault tolerance without the need for shared storage… just brilliant. Do it with everything you can… i’ve read it supposedly on the way for SQL 2012 (but we dont really do SQL)… but hey, even file services…. for some locations, that structure will be preferable to a file cluster

– RDS… RDS is good, but geez the config of it sucks. Requiring TMG for RSA (via OTP) auth is just silly… while i love TMG (and on that, wheres TMG 201x ? – there’s bucket-loads more features to be done there!) – should you really be forcing it upon corporations that dont already have it? (to be answered by techs, not salespeople… give us a CAG equiv) Anyhoo, RDS, getting better every version…. but how about a bit more focus on making it easily usable as opposed to remoteFX stuff. (ok, i’d prefer both)

i did start an article like this for SCCM 2012 – but it just got too long…. 🙂

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