Many an administrator have come to love Remote Installation Services (RIS), the add-on to Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003 that streamed an installation of client and server operating systems over the network and provided the ability to customize installations and set them off with just a few keystrokes.

In Longhorn Server, Microsoft has radically revised RIS and renamed it Windows Deployment Services (WDS). WDS still works using preboot execution environment and trivial file transfer protocol (TFTP) to an operating system, but it includes Windows PE, a graphical front end to the installation process that replaces the ugly, less functional, text-based, blue-screen setup phase that has plagued corporate Windows since NT 3.0. WDS is still being actively developed by Microsoft, so there is more to come on this technology.

Performance and reliability upgrades

Among the other enhancements in Longhorn Server, there will be work done to improve overall system reliability and performance. For example, to view processes in previous versions of Windows Server, you had two basic tools, both of which were virtually unchanged from release to release -- the Task Manager and the Performance Monitor. In Longhorn Server, these tools have been combined into a single interface, called the Performance Diagnostics Console, to make it easier to view statistics and alerts about how well your machine is handling its duties. See Figure 4 for details.

The Resource View is a simpler, but more powerful, view of how certain processes and services, among other metrics, are using the available resources on your machine. The Reliability Monitor shows a detailed view of exactly what events are occurring on a regular or intermittent basis to degrade the stability of your server. For example, you can see problems and degradations based on software installation activity, application failures, hardware missteps, Windows failures and other, uncategorized problems.