When windows server 2008 R2 will be released in 2009 or 2010, there will be some important features related to its release.

Windows Server 2008 R2

Windows server 2008 will solely be an x64 platform, which is going to be the most prominent feature of R2 release. As the current server class hardware is capable of 64-bit computing, the release of R2 will make the upgrade to x64 platforms a real surprise. There is still time to get a 2008 release of Windows on 32-bit platform, before the R2 is finally released. So, it is better to go for it now in order to play the applications, which might not go well on x64 platforms.

Apart from processor changes, some other features of R2 release of Windows server 2008 are:

Hyper- V improvements – As an improvement to initial release of Quick Migration, Hyper-V is planned to offer Live migration, which will measure the migration time in milliseconds. It will also include a support for additional processors and a second level translation (SLAT).

PowerShell 2.0 – It is available in a beta release and customer technology preview capacity, but will be fully loaded with features along with the Windows Server 2008 R2 release. There are over 240 new commands and graphic user interface included in PowerShell 2.0. Users will be able to install it on windows server core.

Core Parking – It will assess the amount of processing across the systems with multiple core and certain configuration, which will suspend the new work to be sent to the cores. It can also be sent to a sleep mode with the core idle feature that will also reduce the overall power consumption of the system.

It is sure that all the new features will add great functionality to the Windows serve admin. Although, the removal of x86 support is not a surprise, but the whole process needs to be set in a motion in order to address any legacy applications.