Jeffrey Snover is lead architect for the Windows Server Division at Microsoft. He has been in the IT industry for over 30 years and with Microsoft
since 1999, and he invented Windows PowerShell. Windows IT Pro technical directors Sean Deuby and Michael Otey sat down with Snover at the
Windows Connections conference in early November to discuss some of the latest enhancements to Windows Server.
Jeffrey Snover, Sean Deuby, and Michael Otey
Sean Deuby:
What does "lead architect for Windows Server" mean? What does that role look like on a day-to-day basis?
Jeffrey Snover:
It's a couple of things. First, we have people who are very specific to a feature -- like the architect for that feature. My role is to look across the
scenarios to make sure they're all fitting together. And then in general, the job of an architect is to be what I call the "guardian of the long-term,"
which is to say, "Hey, that's great, but how is that going to fit in the next release and the release after that?" So that's what I do for Windows
Server -- figure out not just how to deliver a great product in this release, but also use this release to set up the next one and the one after that.
Michael Otey:
Sean and I attended the Windows Server 8 Reviewer's Workshop in September, and we were blown away by all the new features that are coming up in Server
8. I know there are way too many to talk about, but what are some of the highlights for you of what we're going to see?
Snover:
As a technologist, I look at the technology innovations. Although we've had great technology innovations in the past, I think this is by far the
largest, most transformative release we've ever had. We have major innovations in storage. Honestly, in the past, we've had some
weakness in our storage stack and people had to buy very expensive, very high-end storage arrays to do some of the things they wanted to do. Now if you
have those things you're going to get more value out of them because we have a close partnership with those storage vendors. A lot of the things you
think you could only get from the storage arrays, you're going to get with in-box storage. If you sit down and look at the details, in every single
layer of the storage stack there's transformation -- the way we deal with disks, the way we deal with the file system, the way we cluster things
together.
Otey:
Some of the things that really jumped out at me from the storage side were the built-in data deduplication capabilities, which are pretty amazing; the
total revamp of the Checkdisk operations, which are much more efficient and online and dynamic; and the ability to take advantage of the storage
back-end arrays, where you wouldn't have to funnel the I/O through the servers and instead when you're doing a file-copy operation on that back-end
array you can tell it to take advantage of those kinds of things that are built in. Those are big changes, and they're obviously baked into the
hardware at a pretty deep level and into the OS.
Snover:
Right, and in the whole storage space -- the ability to take a bunch of inexpensive disks and pool them together and do thin provisioning and . . .
this delta. In the past, NTFS was designed around SCSI. But it turns out, some of the inexpensive SATA drives didn't correctly implement a number of
the commands. They looked good on a benchmark, but not so good when there's a power outage and now we don't have [any data]. Now we detect that and
modify our flushing algorithms to ensure consistency and get great reliability, from notebook drives all the way up to very large sets of SATA drives
-- so now you can more safely take advantage of commodity components.
Deuby:
That raises an interesting point. A lot of companies are still upgrading to Server 2008 R2, even though Windows Server 8 will be out soon. There's a
big push toward private cloud, and a lot of people are wondering how to manage the private cloud. Storage is one of the reasons you should migrate to
Server 8 rather than stick with Server 2008 R2 as you're building your private cloud and your next-generation infrastructure.
Otey:
Another thing we were really impressed with is some of the changes in the new hypervisor and virtualization of Server 8. Can you tell us about those?
Snover:
First is scale, scale, scale. That's not just limited to virtualization. There's been a strong push from the very beginning on scale -- finding out,
throughout the stack, where the bottlenecks are and fixing them. So now we go up to 640 CPUs. It's phenomenal. When you have a virtualized machine, you
can now have 160 processors and 2TB of RAM, and then the VMs themselves, 32-processor VMs and 512GB of RAM.