Windows 2008 Server Musings

I am currently coordinating an effort building a reference architecture with Microsoft Sharepoint 2007, diving into a rich content model and service-enabling the front-end with the overall goal to use it as a “real” web content management. Our goal was to stick with the Microsoft toolstack (simply because we have free access to all products at work with Razorfish now being a Microsoft-owned company)

Our first idea was to start prototyping on the new Windows 2008 Server.

32 vs 64 Bit

Our initial gut instinct was to stick with what’s working, plus we where only installing on PCs with 4 Gigs of RAM. After the installation I tried to get Hyper-V (built-in virtualization) to work, however, Hyper-V is only supported on the 64 bit version of Windows. I then tried to install Virtual PC 2007 — it complained that the version of Windows I was using wasn’t compatible and that I at least needed to install IIS 6 compatibility modules.

We decided to re-install with the 64 bit version of Windows Server.

Hyper-V

As mentioned, Hyper-V requires 64 bit Windows. After installing all the optional patches and rebooting twice from Windows Update Hyper-V suddenly appeared. I proceeded to install a 64 bit Windows 2008 guest. Once it was installed and booted up I noticed it had no network access. Strange — Hyper-V was configured with a virtual adapter. As it turns out, the drivers for the virtual network adapter are part of the Windows Update patches for Server 2008 — so the guest couldn’t see the network without the updates and of course couldn’t download the updates without the network adapter — if Hyper-V wasn’t technically a CTP I’d be really pissed now. Luckily one can configure a “legacy network adapter” that a freshly installed guest can see at least long enough to fetch the updated drivers.

Hyper-V now runs along just fine with the small caveat that it randomly crashes with a nice message box “Worker process died”.

Verdict: This is not a stable development or even production environment yet.

MOSS 2007

At this point I decided to install MOSS 2007. After a download of the MOSS 2007 ISO the first installation attempt failed — Windows complained there were known compatibility issues with the software and the operating system. Now we downloaded the SP1 files for the WSS foundation and MOSS 2007. Unfortunately there is no consolidates ISO — you have copy the MOSS 2007 ISO to a temporary folder and manually extract the SP1 executables via the command line and copy the contents into the temporary folder with the ISO. The installation then fails with an error that the sample database cannot be set up.

Just trying to install WSS 3.0 SP1 by itself at least works fine.