Kurt Shintaku's Blog

<taken from the Windows Server Division Blog>

Building off the great work done on Windows Server 2008, I’m happy to share that next week, a small group of Technology Adoption Program customers will be getting their hands on Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 (SP2) Beta. As we have done in the past, we routinely start testing a service pack release for Windows Server with a small group of testers first before making the beta more broadly available to the public. Windows Server 2008 helped make major strides in the areas of Web, Virtualization, and Security. SP2 builds upon this by enhancing the operating system for IT Professionals.

Windows Server 2008 SP2 addresses feedback from our customers. It contains all previously released fixes integrated into a single service pack covering both server (Windows Server 2008) and client (Windows Vista) versions. We adopted a single serviceability model for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista when we launched Windows Server 2008. Because of this, Microsoft can provide customers with a single, high-quality update that minimizes deployment and testing complexity.

In addition to the above, Windows Server 2008 SP2 contains two changes that will ease deployment and help reduce cost.

• Hyper-V RTM is included
• Additional changes to the power profile have yielded a 10% improvement over the power profile of Windows Server 2008 RTM

In case you’re wondering, no you didn’t miss Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 1.  We actually released the first version of Windows Server 2008 as “Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 1” because it depended highly on the Windows Vista codebase.  They now share (as they did back in the NT 4.0 era) common core services and so when Windows Server 2008 was released, it was based on the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 source.

Hence the next Service Pack being called “Service Pack 2”.