As far as Microsoft is concerned, Windows Server 2008 will soon take the same path as Windows Server 2003. This, because the company is evolving its server farm keeping the pace with the evolution of the Windows Server operating system. Microsoft.com is already running on top of Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta (Windows 7 Server) almost entirely, the Redmond company confirmed. However, Windows Server 2008 is also being kept around, at least for the time being.

“Although many requests are being served by IIS 7.5, we have not updated the entire server farm. For example, in one cluster of servers we have left a single “Lone Server” running Windows Server 2008 to act as a control and provide side-by-side comparisons,” revealed David Lowe, senior product manager, Microsoft Windows Server Division. “There are still also full clusters running on Windows Server 2008 so that we can do a cluster-to-cluster comparisons and provide a greater degree of failover, although it is our plan to have Microsoft.com completely migrated to Windows Server 2008 R2 well before RTM.”

One important aspect that Lowe underlined is the fact that the actual physical server infrastructure did not require upgrades or reconfiguration in order to be transitioned from Windows Server 2008 to Windows Server 2008 R2. In this regard, customers will be able to upgrade their server operating systems by keeping the hardware in place. Still, older servers, on the verge of, or even that have outlived their respective product refresh cycle, will have to go.

“IIS 7.5 is the Web server in Windows Server 2008 R2, now available in Beta, that builds on all the good stuff in IIS 7.0 (that’s right: more reliable, more control, more secure, more choice), and integrates IIS Extensions such as FTP, WebDAV and the IIS Administration Pack. And of course, Windows Server 2008 R2 also provides full ASP.NET support on Server Core installations, and includes a new Web Administration module and IIS cmdlets for Windows PowerShell 2.0,” Lowe added.

Just as is the case with Windows 7 client Beta, the Beta of Windows Server 2008 R2 is also feature complete. This means that Microsoft will only tackle issues related to overall quality and improving performance for the upcoming Release Candidate (RC) and RTM (release to manufacturing) stages.

“We are already seeing some positive indications regarding performance on the new servers thanks to some tweaks we’ve made in request processing and CPU utilization, but it’s too early to share any further details on that just yet. We are already running a sizeable chunk of Microsoft.com on the newer version of Hyper-V that ships in Windows Server 2008 R2, and we even have some of our Web servers running on Server Core installations, but again, we’ll need further analysis and testing before we can get more specific on the reliability and performance improvements you should expect to see from those enhancements,” Lowe said.

Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta (Windows 7 Server Beta) is available for download here.