14 DAY TRIAL // At the end of May 2009, Microsoft made available for download and started offering as an update the second service pack for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. In the time passed since the RTM of Vista SP2 and Windows Server 2008 SP2, bundled in the same package, the Redmond company revealed that it had seen “great adoption” of the new release. In this regard, the software giant is inviting customers running Windows Server 2008 SP1/RTM to upgrade to Service Pack 2, especially those running Hyper-V, as SP2 RTM brings consistent enhancements, compared with the plain vanilla release of the Windows server operating system.
“With Windows Server 2008 SP2, Hyper-V final bits are included so there’s no need to pull down individual downloads which speeds up deployments. There are also some notable updates in SP2, including scalability enhancements for running on systems with up to 24 logical processors which enables support for up to 192 running virtual machines, update for Hyper-V when managed with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and updates for backup/restore of virtual machines with the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS),” a member of the Windows Server Division revealed.
When it launched Windows Server 2008 RTM/SP1, Microsoft was yet to finalize its hypervisor role for the platform. This is why the company only included the Beta version of Hyper-V and released the finalized virtualization solution as an update later on. This is no longer the case for SP2. Microsoft indicated that customers looking to upgrade Hyper-V Beta would first have to move to the RTM version, and only after that to SP2. At the same time, the advice is to uninstall any previous release of SP2 before implementing the final bits.
“If a fresh SP2 install is being done and you’d like to move VMs to it, export the VMs from the originating Windows Server 2008 host and import them on the SP2 host. Integration Components (ICs) for the child virtual machines must be updated to the SP2 version. If you’re doing a fresh install or an upgrade of SP2 on the parent partition, it does not update the integration components inside the virtual machine. Be sure to update the VM ICs after SP2 is installed. If you have virtual machines created on the Beta version of the Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V role, and you installed the Beta version of the integration components on those machines, you must uninstall the integration components and reinstall the latest SP2 integration components,” the Windows Server Division team representative said.
Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 (SP2) Beta is available for download here.