Q&A: Microsoft's Windows Server chief on Windows Server road map, Part 2

Computerworld - Bob Muglia, senior vice president of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Server division, in an interview last week discussed the road map for future operating system releases, the competitive threat posed by Linux and the promise of 64-bit computing. Part 1 of the interview is available here. Part 2 of the interview follows:

How is work progressing on Longhorn, the next major Windows release, due in 2007? We are building both a client and server release simultaneously. We'll track the milestones one for one. We will continue to test the server for six to 12 months after the client ships because the server requires long times to go in regression test cycles to assure the availability of the product.

Is there any chance Longhorn server will come out more than 12 months after the client? It's always possible. I'm trying to create a structure where customers can have some expectations, and yet ultimately we'll ship it when it's ready to be shipped. What we know for sure is that when we give Windows Server to our beta-test customers and our internal IT organization, they run multiple regression tests, which take six to eight weeks at a shot. Then you've got to take that data back and come out with another one.

You've talked about the three major elements of Longhorn in the past: the WinFS storage model, the Indigo communications technologies for building advanced Web services, and the Avalon graphics subsystem. What are some of the other new features that corporate users will find useful? Dynamic partitioning is an interesting discussion. Typically, these are the Itanium-based systems, these 16-to-64-way systems that are basically mainframes that we run on. We don't support dynamic partitioning within those environments. Today dynamic partitioning means that within an OS image, you can get resources to environments or swap resources out. So basically, you could have a 32-way system; if a processor fails, the operating system can notice that a processor fails and dynamically swap in a new one to keep the application running without having any downtime at all. It's a substantive advantage, from a high-availability perspective.

There's a new scripting engine, code-named Monad. It's a completely managed code environment, and it is fully backward compatible with existing commands on Windows servers. But Monad is really designed to improve the way an administrator can create scripts that pass information from one command to another. It uses XML as a mechanism for transmitting information between commands.

What are the areas of focus for the interim Windows Server release, code-named R2, which is due in the second half of 2005?