SEATTLE — If you think Microsoft is jazzed about the potential of 64-bit desktops, wait until you hear how they are planning around 64-bit servers.

On the final day of its Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) here, Microsoft expanded on its Windows Server platform strategy.

While company officials didn't offer any details on the "Windows Server 2003 Update" — the interim Windows Server release code-named "R2" and expected next year — they did talk about the hardware design points they are targeting with Longhorn Server, which Microsoft execs currently are hinting will ship in 2006/2007, a few months after Longhorn client.

(Microsoft is expected to talk more about R2 next week, when the company is expected to go public with more Windows Server roadmap details.)

By 2005, "we expect virtually all servers to be 64-bit-capabable," said Jim Livingston, lead program manager with Microsoft's Windows Server architecture team in his Friday morning talk.

Livingston said that Microsoft is tracking three trends that are affecting how it is designing its server products. He said the company considers 64-bit to be the volume server platform, for everything from blades, to high-end servers. He noted that Microsoft is seeing exponential growth in the number of "sockets," or processors, supported in all categories of servers, as well as in the number of "cores," or threads, supported per processor. And Microsoft is expecting partitioning to become "pervasive" across all server families in the not-too-distant future, Livingston added.

Microsoft is predicting "commodity" low- to –mid-range server platform in this time frame will be four-socket servers supporting 16-plus threads. Microsoft is identifying "high mid-range servers" in the 2006/2007 time frame as machines running eight sockets and 32-plus threads.

Livingston told WinHEC attendees that Microsoft considers 1,000-socket machines to be "on a relatively near-term horizon," meaning the Longhorn timeframe (2006/2007).

What's Redmond Got Up Its Sleeve?

So what does Redmond have up its sleeve to take advantage of all this horsepower?

First up, according to Livingston, is the Microsoft Virtual Server (MVS) 2005 product, which he said will ship in June of this year. MVS 2005 is based on the Connectix virtual server technology that Microsoft acquired last year.

MVS 2005 will provide for support for up to 64 virtual machines running on a single server. He reiterated that Microsoft is expecting far and away most of its customers to use MVS to help with migration to new operating systems and applications. Over time, as Microsoft adds X64 support to MVS, it also will enable users to run 32-bit apps on 64-bit machines, he said.

Livingston noted that internally, Microsoft is running both Longhorn client and Longhorn server builds on top of MVS.

Next up will be Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1), which is due out by the end of this calendar year.

SP1 will include support for many of the security features that will be part of Windows XP Service Pack 2, such as remote-procedure-call and Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) lock-down, Livingston confirmed. And it will also act as the foundation for Microsoft's 64-bit Extensions releases, which are due to ship simultaneously with SP1.

("Windows Server Futures at WinHEC" Page 2)

SP1 will add to Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition support for IA 64 and X64 processors. To Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, SP1 will add support for 32 GB of RAM for 32-bit systems and 1024 GB for 64-bit systems (as well as support for X64 systems). And it will add support for 1024 GB of RAM for 64-bit Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition systems, as well as support for X64 systems.

"The mainframe environment is not getting any better. We will eventually catch it and supersede it," Livingston predicted.

But What's on Tap for 'R2'?

Livingston studiously avoided any mention of the R2 interim Windows Server release Windows Server 2003 Release expected next year.

Other Microsoft officials have said publicly that R2 will include bug fixes that Microsoft has made to Windows Server 2003 since the product shipped last April. They also have said it will include some of the 12 to 15 Windows Server "feature packs" that the company has rolled out in the past year. These feature packs include things like "Group Policy Management Console," "Active Directory Application Mode" and "SharePoint Services." But Microsoft's been mum as to what to expect in R2 beyond that.

But developers claiming familiarity with Microsoft's roadmap said that R2 will feature the advanced network-quarantine security technology that Microsoft has mentioned in passing as part of its security roadmap.

There are rudimentary network-quarantine capabilities already built into Windows Server 2003. But R's network quarantine, according to developers, will go a step further by checking the "health" of all client machines" by running antivirus and other "scriptable checks" on systems before they are allowed to connect to a corporate network via a virtual-private network or DHCP. If a client is "quarantined," it will receive access to patches and other inoculations/services to return it to an acceptable state of health.

R2 also is likely to include the next-generation "terminal services" technology — code-named "Bear Paw" — upon which Microsoft has been working, developers said.

According to sources, Microsoft is positioning Bear Paw as a product for mid-sized businesses that will enable new user experiences, such as application publishing and provisioning; seamless application access; portal-style access to applications and other "VPN-less" scenarios. Among Bear Paw's planned features are remote app-publishing; terminal server portal and terminal server proxy add-ons; and pass-through authentication, sources told Microsoft Watch.

One of the key Bear-Paw-enabled scenarios Microsoft is likely to highlight is branch-server deployment and management, the developer sources added. Microsoft is developing something called the "branch management framework," according to developers. Via this branch/hub set-up, companies will be able to provide their users with centralized application configuration, monitoring and troubleshooting, the sources added.

(This story includes information that was published in the May 3, 2004, issue of the Microsoft Watch newsletter.)