Next Wednesday, in the City of the Angels, there’s going to be be a hefty Microsoft bash. In the presence of way too many over-excited Microsoft marketing executives, SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 (WS2008) and Visual Studio 2008 will all thunder down the launch slipway, probably into a river of champagne ­ except the SQL Server update, which has been delayed until later in the third quarter.

Unfortunately, probably the most eagerly awaited piece of WS2008 will not be in the package at launch, but will be there up to 180 days after WS2008 is RTM’d. I’m talking about Microsoft’s virtualisation system, the hypervisor or Hyper-V as it will be called. Currently users have to use Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 to run virtual operating systems, but Hyper-V should allow such OSs to run faster.

Travelling to a workshop on WS2008 a couple of weeks ago, I pondered on what I’d seen last year after installing some of the release candidates and beta previews. Would Microsoft really be putting all that functionality into the latest version of its server?
The problem is that if every feature is installed, a hefty piece of hardware would be needed to run all said options if you’re a large global enterprise, and if that hardware crashed, then it’s lights out for a lot of services, such as Active Directory, DHCP, DNS, IIS, NAP, NLB, Terminal Services, virtualisation and many more.

Another problem is the network bandwidth utilisation that is needed if you load all these services. Small firms would probably want to run the whole lot off one server, but no large enterprise would do it from one box. If you do want to build some redundancy, you’ll need more copies of WS2008.

I did put this to the UK WS2008 product manager, but he said there’ll be no changing of how this server will be licensed ­ Microsoft will not be allowing the different features in WS2008 to be run on separate hardware using one copy of the product.

So you won’t be able to run one server as a domain controller, one as part of Microsoft’s NAP system and another sorting out Terminal Services. I hear you shout you can ­ wait until Hyper-V is launched, and then buy the datacentre edition, which allows users to run an unlimited number of instances on that hardware.

At the workshop, I wondered what music Microsoft would be choosing for its WS2008 launch tagged with the catchphrase Heroes happen {here}. One immediately springs to mind ­ David Bowie’s Heroes. For IT managers, the line “We can be heroes, just for one day” cuts no ice with the chief executive. He needs heroes 24/7.