Snover re-factoring Windows Server & System Center

My last two posts on Microsoft were filled with angst and despair at Microsoft’s announcement that the next gen versions of Server & System Center would be delayed until sometime in 2016. Why, I cried out, why the delay on Server, and what’s to become of my System Center, I wondered?

I went a bit off-the-rails, imagining that Satya Nadella had shaken things up for the System Center team. Then I wrote a letter to him asking him what was up.

Well, I was wrong on all that, or perhaps I was only a little bit right.

There was a shakeup, but it wasn’t Nadella who had angrily overturned a gigantic redwood table at System Center HQ, spilling Visio shapes & System Center management packs as he did so, rather it was Mr Windows himself, the Most Distinguished of Distinguished Technical Fellows, Dr. Jeffrey Snover who had shaken things up.

Yes. The Padre of Powershell himself filled in the gaps for me on why System Center & Windows Server were delayed during a TechDays online one day after my last post.

During that  talk, he announced that the Windows Server Team has been meshed with the System Center Team and, even better, the Azure team. Hot dog.

Redmond mag:

[Snover] explained that the System Center team and the Windows Server team are now “a single organization,” with common planning and scheduling. He said that the integration of the two formerly separate organizations isn’t 100 percent, but it’s better than it’s been in the past. The team also takes advantage of joint development efforts with the Microsoft Azure team, he added.

That’s outstanding news in my view.

Microsoft’s private|hybrid|public cloud story is second to none as far as I’m concerned. No one else offers deep integration between cutting edge public cloud systems (Azure) with your on-prem legacy infrastructure stack.

Yet that deep integration (not speaking of AAD Sync & ADFS 3 here) was becoming confused and muddled with overlap between the older tools (System Center) and the newer tools like Desired State Configuration, mixed in with AzurePack, an on-prem/cloud management engine.

It sounds to me like Snover’s going to put together a coherent strategy using all the tools, and I can’t think of a better guy to do the job.

But what of Windows server?

It’s getting Snovered too, but in a way that’s not as clear to me. Again, Redmond mag:

The next Windows Server product will be deeply refactored for cloud scenarios. It will have just the components for that and nothing else, Snover explained. Next, on top of that, Microsoft plans to build a server that will be the same as the Windows Servers that organizations currently use. This server it will have two application profiles. One of the application profiles will target the existing APIs for Windows Server, while the other will target the subsets of the APIs that are cloud optimized, Snover explained. On top of the server, it will be possible to install a client, he added. This redesign is happening to better support automation, he explained.

I watched most of Snover’s talk, took a few days to think about it, and still have no idea what to make of the high-level architecture slide below that flashed on screen briefly:

Some thoughts that ran through my head: is the cloud-optimized server akin to CoreOS, with active/passive boot partitions, something that will finally make Patch Tuesday obsolete? One could hope that with further abstraction, we’ll get something like that in Windows Server vNext.

In some sense, we already have parts of this: if you enable the Hyper-V feature on a bare-metal computer, you emerge, after a few reboots, running a Windows virtual machine atop a Type-1 Hypervisor.

Big deal right? Well, Snover’s slide seems to indicate this will be the default state for the next generation of Windows server, but more than that, it seems to indicate that what we think of as the Type-1 Hyperivisor is getting a bunch of new features, like container support.

We knew Docker support was coming, but at this level, and almost indistinguishable from the hypervisor itself?

That’s potentially all kinds of awesome.

Interestingly, Server Roles & Features look like they’re being recast into a “Client” level that operates above a Windows Server.

Which, if we continue down the rabbit hole, means we have to ask the question: If my AD Domain Controller  or my RemoteApp session host farm servers are now clients, what are they running on? It certainly doesn’t seem to be a Windows server anymore, but rather a kind agnostic compute fabric, made up of virtual “Servers” and/or “Containers” operating atop a cloud-optimized server running on bare-metal…an agnostic computing ((Damn straight, had to work that in there)) fabric that stretches across my old on-prem Dells all the way up to the Azure cloud…right?!?

I’m like four levels deep into Jeffrey Snover’s subconscious so I’ll stop, but suffice it to say, the delay of Windows Server & System Center appears to be justified and I can’t wait to start testing it in 2016.