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I was lucky enough to attend the Microsoft New Efficiency event for Windows Server 2008 R2 on Monday.  It was a limited capacity technical briefing aimed at IT Professionals.  They also had an Exchange 2010 and Windows 7 track at the same time but I chose to attend the Server 2008 R2 track.  It was divided into 4 sections and was hosted by Kevin Saye (kevin.saye@microsoft.com) who is the Pre-sales technical support specialist for Windows Server in this region.  I’ve heard him speak at events before but never had a chance to actually do a QA session with him till now.

So, on to the new stuff in Server 2008 R2 that I found interesting!  This is not a comprehensive list by an means, just the stuff I thought was very useful.  I’ll go over each in detail in the coming days and how it will fit into your enterprise environment.

-Active Directory Administrative Center (ADAC)
-Managed Service accounts
-Active Directory Recycle Bin
-Graphical PowerShell
-Turning off CPU cores to conserve power
-Group policy can now execute Powershell scritpts
-Group policy granularity through item level targeting
-FCI to classify data and take actions on it
-.NET now runs on Server Core installs
-Remote Desktop Services now has multi-monitor support (up to 8 monitors), bi-directional audio (useful for VOIP), and enhanced multimedia support using your local graphics card instead of “screen painting” as it was before.
-DirectAccess with Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 – Extends the network to include remote users instead of just a remote user dialing in via VPN.  Uses the Teredo protocol.  Was able to access the Microsoft intranet site (http://msw) without ever having to dial in and from behind a corporate firewall.  It uses IPsec and it only works with Windows 7 machines which are on the domain. 
-Branch Cache – Caches only the requested data unlike DFS.  Means a lot less space is required unlike DFS which is an exact duplicate.

THE FUTURE
Kevin says expect to see more componentization in MS products.  Expect to moved vhds around on servers like OS, Apps, & Data vhds interchangeably on your VMs.

You can install pretty much any windows component locally or remotely on a server.  Here is an example of installing SNMP using an answer file via command line locally on a server:

sysocmgr /i:%windir%\inf\sysoc.inf /u:”\\server\share\snmp.txt” /q

This will install SNMP quietly using the answer file I give it which is located on a file share.  Here are the contents of the answer file:

[NetOptionalComponents]
SNMP = 1

[SNMP]

Send_Authentication = Yes
Accept_CommunityName = mine_ro:Read_Only
Any_Host = No
Limit_Host = xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

This will automatically configure a new read only community you specify and add a single host that is allowed to connect (you can add more IPs but adding a comma after each one).  The only dilemma is that during the install, it needs to get at the i386 directory and by default in the registry, it is pointed to “D:/i386” more than likely since that is typically the CD-ROM drive you installed the OS from.  We just need to run a quick registry update to two keys that point it to the C: drive before running the line above and it should work with no issue.  This can be done in bulk on servers too using whatever remote management tool you prefer:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\ CurrentVersion\Sourcepath

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows \CurrentVersion\Setup\Sourcepath

Keep in mind sysocmgr.exe has been replaced in Server 2008 by ocsetup.exe.  You can read up on command line switches for it here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd673656.aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc766272(WS.10).aspx