Vista, Longhorn Server: Working better together

06.12.2006
Longhorn Server and Vista are of the same ilk. Over 70 percent of the code in the two products is shared; in fact, Vista and Server were being developed together for much of the Vista development cycle.

Teams that work on one product work on the other. Vista security updates, if needed, are so simple that the development team can simply drop them into code so that Longhorn Server will immediately benefit and launch securely when it's released.

The two operating systems are, if ever there were such a thing, brother and sister. They were designed to work together. In fact, Windows Vista Service Pack 1 will ship at the same time that Longhorn Server -- whatever its name may be at that time -- is released to the general public, to make the tandem experience even better.

Among other methods, here are some of the most important ways in which Windows Vista and Longhorn Server work better, both together and as compared to previous versions of Windows:

Windows Deployment Services (WDS) is a much-needed improvement to the standard Remote Installation Services. WDS supports a disk image-based rollout of Windows, rather than flat file copying like RIS. The result is that deployments are completed faster, images are easy to edit (just mount them and add files as necessary), and hardware changes and support is easier, since the disk image WDS rolls out by default is generic enough to essentially run on any hardware.

No more bashing your head against the screen trying to integrate drivers into a RIS setup -- that painful experience doesn't exist anymore with WDS.