Bill Laing, Microsoft's vice president of Windows Server and systems, said late last year that a company's entire network does not have to be IPv6 for DirectAccess to work. The client nodes and some of the network nodes for tasks such as authentication have to support IPv6. But he did add that users will also need to support IPSec.

"DirectAccess is a compelling feature, but there is infrastructure work you need to do and it will take time to roll this out," Laing said.

Other Windows 7 integration points with R2 include Branch Caching, which caches frequently used content on a branch-office network; a read-only Distributed File System (DFS) to improve branch office security, power management via Group Policy, BitLocker drive encryption for USB drives referred to as BitLocker To Go, and an Offline Folders feature for mobile users.

Unique to the server side, the R2 release includes support for Live Migration, a much anticipated feature add-on to Hyper-V. Not only will the feature help Microsoft match similar tools already available from VMware and open-source hypervisor platforms, Live Migration is key for availability and scalability in the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) support coming in R2 server.

Another key VDI component is Remote Desktop Services (RDS), formerly called Terminal Services, which allows users outside the intranet to connect to desktops and application running inside virtual machines on a server.