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' ! Moshe Kaplan constantly helps successful firms getting to the next level and he is thrilled to uncover some of his secrets. Mr. Kaplan is a seasoned project management and cloud technologies lecturer. He is also known to be a cloud and SCRUM evangelist Moshe is a dSero.com Co-Founder. He was a R&D Director at Essence Security, led RockeTier and served as a board member in the IGT and as a department head at a top IDF IT unit. Moshe holds M.Sc and B.Sc from TAU. Moshe is a DZone MVB and is not an employee of DZone and has posted 33 posts at DZone. You can read more from them at their website. View Full User Profile

Cloud Computing and Windows 2008

05.17.2011
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Pain
This time we'll talk about a real pain in the Microsoft camp: why Windows 2008 is rarely supported by cloud providers such as Amazon AWS/EC2, AppNexus and Rackspace Cloud?

One of the few exceptions is Microsoft Azure which is still in CTP and is using a modified Windows 2008 version.

New features, New challenges...
Windows 2008 which has a lot of new features such as safer service shutdown and kernel transaction manager also includes a new activation method (which is probably familiar to those of you who use Vista).

According to my conversation with a leading cloud provider, this new activation method prevents them from generating images with predefined keys. Therefore, they cannot provide on demand Windows 2008 instances. The cloud providers are currently in advanced negotiations with Microsoft and provide only Windows 2003 instances.

The Question
Are there hidden causes behind this Microsoft restriction? or will a solution will be found before Azure RTM? Only time will tell...
References
Reference: 
Cloud Computing and Windows 2008
Published at DZone with permission of Moshe Kaplan, author and DZone MVB. (source)

(Note: Opinions expressed in this article and its replies are the opinions of their respective authors and not those of DZone, Inc.)

Comments

Moshe Kaplan replied on Wed, 2011/05/18 - 8:51am

Hi, Please notice that it's a relatively old post, Amazon now support Windows 2008 R2. Yet, you could refer it as a case study to "the cloud wars", we have many of them in front of us, Keep Performing, Moshe Kaplan Moshe Kaplan Cloud and System Performance Blog

Igor Papirov replied on Mon, 2011/05/23 - 2:33am

uhm, just a clarification, Windows Azure has been out of CTP for the last 1.5 years.

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