Windows Media Services 2008 R2 Release Candidate

Microsoft has released an updated version of the RC for Windows Media Services (WMS) 2008 R2.  You may have noticed that some components for IIS are no longer included in the Windows Server media, e.g. FTP and WebDAV.  Why?  Microsoft appears to have taken a similar strategy with IIS like they did with Live Essentials for Windows 7.  Their thinking is that separating the release schedules will allow them to update the web component more frequently, e.g. we’ve already had 2 RTM releases of FTP (7.0 and 7.5) for IIS 7.X.  It also allows the product teams to continue working on something until they have it right and not to the greater Server schedule.

Windows Media Services 2008 R2 RC promises:

“More Options. Installs on all Windows Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate (6.1.7100) editions, including the following:

• Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter
• Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise
• Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard
• Windows Server 2008 R2 Foundation – new option for WMS!
• Windows Web Server 2008 R2

More Value. All unicast streaming features are now available on all versions of Windows Server 2008 R2 (see table, below).

Higher Reliability. Already-proven on-demand and live streaming reliability further improves in Windows Server 2008 R2.

Easier Deployment. Fewer installation packages makes deploying WMS simpler:

• One package for all editions of Windows Server 2008 R2
• Two packages for the WMS Remote Server Administration Tool (for use on 32-bit and 64-bit Windows 7 clients)

Better Virtualization. Hyper-V for Windows Server 2008 R2 improves performance and manageability of streaming VMs.

Reduced Power Consumption. Windows Server 2008 R2 can dynamically adjust power usage as streaming loads change.

Multicast for Silverlight. With the new Silverlight Multicast Plug-in, WMS can now deliver multicast streams to Silverlight”.

You should check out the MS post to see the feature differences between running WMS on Server Standard VS Enterprise/DataCenter editions.

Microsoft also reminds us that the “easiest way to get started with the WMS 2008 R2 is by running the Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta on your Windows Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate server”.