MICROSOFT WINDOWS SERVER 2008 AND 2008 R2 FEATURES

Microsoft had to delay Server 2008’s appearance by years due to the change in the network security environment, offering some nice upgrades and also its surprising followed release, Server 2008 R2. The features of Server 2008 and R2 can be comprised into six categories, given below.
1. Active Directory (AD),
2. New setup technologies,
3. Changes the underlying operating system,
4. Networking changes,
5. File and print services and
6. Web-based services.
The Active Directory (AD) is the central database of user and machine authentication data, also the keystone piece of Windows networking and Microsoft has included several new capabilities mainly simplifying AD security and disaster recovery with new admin tools providing more flexibility to the system.
- Read-Only Domain Controllers (RODC) has been added which used to be only domain controller (DC) in previous versions which can act as a DC and that it can help users get authenticated to the file, print and web servers that those users need to access.
New Windows backup has been introduced, known as Windows Server Backup which can do a bare metal backup in which if a server has hardware failure, then new server hardware can be placed and the backup can be restored, thus making it the old server.
Password policies have been finely grained, offering creation of as many different password policies as you like and attach them to groups or users.
Server 2008 and R2 offered new technologies to simplify undeleting AD objects. A solution to the AD undelete problem was introduced with AD Recycle bin, which is actually a set of command-line tools.
Another feature is the PowerShell and AD Administrative Center. PowerShell lets you create GUI tools and R2 includes an example PowerShell GUI AD administration tool called the Active Directory Administration Center (ADAC) offering two user management tools- ADUC and ADAC.
With these features, DCPromo Improvements for converting Windows servers to DCs (promotion) or converting DCs to simple member servers (demotion) after Windows 2000. Also, for networking it introduced IPv6, Network Access Protection (NAP), Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol (SSTP) VPN and management tools called Server Manager has been added, with remote tools-WinRM (Windows Remote Management) and WinRS.