Windows Server 2008 R2, codenamed "Windows Server 7" or "Windows Server 2008 Release 2", is the eighth major version of the

Windows NT Windows NT is a Proprietary software, proprietary Graphical user interface, graphical operating system produced by Microsoft as part of its Windows product line, the first version of which, Windows NT 3.1, was released on July 27, 1993. Original ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

produced by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

to be released under the

Windows Server Windows Server (formerly Windows NT Server) is a brand name for Server (computing), server-oriented releases of the Windows NT operating system (OS) that have been developed by Microsoft since 1993. The first release under this brand name i ...

brand name. It was

released to manufacturing The software release life cycle is the process of developing, testing, and distributing a software product (e.g., an operating system). It typically consists of several stages, such as pre-alpha, alpha, beta, and release candidate, before the fi ...

on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009, the same respective release dates of

Windows 7 Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, ...

. It is the successor to the

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft W ...

-based

Windows Server 2008 Windows Server 2008, codenamed "Longhorn Server" (alternatives: "Windows Vista Server" or "Windows Server Vista"), is the seventh major version of the Windows NT operating system produced by Microsoft to be released under the Windows Server b ...

, released the previous year, and was succeeded by the

Windows 8 Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012, made available for download via Microsoft ...

-based

Windows Server 2012 Windows Server 2012, codenamed "Windows Server 8", is the ninth major version of the Windows NT operating system produced by Microsoft to be released under the Windows Server brand name. It is the server version of Windows based on Windows ...

. Enhancements in Windows Server 2008 R2 include new functionality for

Active Directory Active Directory (AD) is a directory service developed by Microsoft for Windows domain networks. Windows Server operating systems include it as a set of processes and services. Originally, only centralized domain management used Active Direct ...

, new

virtualization In computing, virtualization (abbreviated v12n) is a series of technologies that allows dividing of physical computing resources into a series of virtual machines, operating systems, processes or containers. Virtualization began in the 1960s wit ...

and management features, version 7.5 of the

Internet Information Services Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Services, IIS, 2S) is an extensible web server created by Microsoft for use with the Windows NT family. IIS supports HTTP, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, SMTP and NNTP. It has been an integral part o ...

web server A web server is computer software and underlying Computer hardware, hardware that accepts requests via Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, co ...

and support for up to 256 logical processors. It is built on the same

kernel Kernel may refer to: Computing * Kernel (operating system), the central component of most operating systems * Kernel (image processing), a matrix used for image convolution * Compute kernel, in GPGPU programming * Kernel method, in machine learnin ...

used with the client-oriented

, and is the first

server Server may refer to: Computing *Server (computing), a computer program or a device that provides requested information for other programs or devices, called clients. Role * Waiting staff, those who work at a restaurant or a bar attending custome ...

operating system released by Microsoft which dropped support for 32-bit processors, an addition which carried over to the consumer-oriented

Windows 11 Windows 11 is a version of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system, released on October 5, 2021, as the successor to Windows 10 (2015). It is available as a free upgrade for devices running Windows 10 that meet the #System requirements, Windo ...

. It is the final version of Windows Server that includes Enterprise and Web Server editions, the final that got a service pack from Microsoft and the final version that supports

IA-64 IA-64 (Intel Itanium architecture) is the instruction set architecture (ISA) of the discontinued Itanium family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors. The basic ISA specification originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was subsequently implemented by ...

and processors without PAE,

SSE2 SSE2 (Streaming SIMD Extensions 2) is one of the Intel SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) processor supplementary instruction sets introduced by Intel with the initial version of the Pentium 4 in 2000. SSE2 instructions allow the use of ...

and NX (although a 2018 update dropped support for non-SSE2 processors). Seven editions of Windows Server 2008 R2 were released: Foundation, Standard, Enterprise, Datacenter, Web, HPC Server and

Itanium Itanium (; ) is a discontinued family of 64-bit computing, 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). The Itanium architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was later jointly dev ...

, as well as Windows Storage Server 2008 R2. A

home server A home server is a computing server located in a private computing residence providing services to other devices inside or outside the household through a home network or the Internet. Such services may include file and printer serving, media ...

variant called Windows Home Server 2011 was also released.

History

Microsoft introduced Windows Server 2008 R2 at the 2008

Professional Developers Conference Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) was a series of conferences for software developers; the conference was held infrequently to coincide with beta releases of the Microsoft Windows, Windows operating system, and showcased topic ...

as the server variant of

, based on the

kernel. On January 7, 2009, a

beta release The software release life cycle is the process of developing, testing, and distributing a software product (e.g., an operating system). It typically consists of several stages, such as pre-alpha, alpha, beta, and release candidate, before the fi ...

of Windows Server 2008 R2 was made available to subscribers of Microsoft's TechNet and

MSDN Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) was the division of Microsoft responsible for managing the firm's relationship with developers and testers, such as hardware developers interested in the operating system (OS), and software developers developing ...

programs, as well as those participating in the Microsoft Connect program for Windows 7. Two days later, the beta was released to the public via the Microsoft Download Center. On April 30, 2009, the

release candidate The software release life cycle is the process of developing, testing, and distributing a software product (e.g., an operating system). It typically consists of several stages, such as pre-alpha, alpha, beta, and release candidate, before the fi ...

was made available to subscribers of TechNet and MSDN. On May 5, 2009, the release candidate was made available to the public via the Microsoft download center. According to ''Windows Server Blog'', the following are the dates of the year 2009 when Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 has been made available to various distribution channels: * OEMs received Windows Server 2008 R2 in English and all language packs on July 29. The remaining languages were available around August 11. *

Independent software vendor An independent software vendor (ISV), also known as a software publisher, is an organization specializing in making and selling software, in contrast to computer hardware, designed for mass or niche markets. This is in contrast to in-house softwa ...

(ISV) and

independent hardware vendor An Independent Hardware Vendor (IHV) is a company that designs, manufactures or sells hardware or peripherals compatible with operating systems. Examples of Independent hardware vendors are Intel, AMD and Samsung. See also *Independent software v ...

(IHV) partners have been able to download Windows Server 2008 R2 from MSDN starting on August 14. * IT professionals with TechNet subscriptions were able to download Windows Server 2008 R2 and obtain product keys for English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish variants beginning August 14 and all remaining languages beginning August 21. * Developers with MSDN subscriptions have been able to download and obtain product keys for Windows Server 2008 R2 in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish starting August 14 and all remaining languages starting August 21. * Microsoft Partner Program (MPP) gold/certified members were able to download Windows Server 2008 R2 through the MPP portal on August 19. *

Volume licensing In software licensing, volume licensing is the practice of using one license to authorize software on a large number of computers and/or for a large number of users. Customers of such licensing schemes are typically business, governmental or e ...

customers with an existing Software Assurance (SA) contracts were able to download Windows Server 2008 R2 on August 19 via the Volume License Service Center. * Volume licensing customers without an SA were able to purchase Windows Server 2008 R2 through volume licensing by September 1. Additionally, qualifying students have been able to download Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard edition in 15 languages from the

Microsoft Imagine Microsoft Azure Dev Tools for Teaching or simply Azure Dev Tools for Teaching is a Microsoft program to provide students with Microsoft software design, Microsoft developer tools, Cloud Computing Access and learning resources. The program is ava ...

program (known as DreamSpark at the time).

New features

A reviewer guide published by the company describes several areas of improvement in R2. These include new virtualization capabilities ( Live Migration,

Cluster Shared Volumes Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) is a feature of Failover Clustering first introduced in Windows Server 2008 R2 for use with the Hyper-V role. A Cluster Shared Volume is a shared disk containing an NTFS or ReFS (ReFS: Windows Server 2012 R2 or newer) v ...

using

Failover Clustering In computing, high-availability clusters (HA clusters) or fail-over clusters are groups of computers that support server (computing), server application software, applications that can be reliably utilized with high availability, a minimum amount ...

and

Hyper-V Hyper-V is a native hypervisor developed by Microsoft; it can create virtual machines on x86-64 systems running Windows. It is included in Pro and Enterprise editions of Windows (since Windows 8) as an optional feature to be manually enabled. A ...

), reduced power consumption, a new set of management tools and new

capabilities such as a "recycle bin" for deleted objects. IIS 7.5 has been added to this release which also includes updated

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and dat ...

server services. Security enhancements include encrypted clientless authenticated VPN services through

DirectAccess DirectAccess, also known as Unified Remote Access, is a VPN technology that provides intranet connectivity to client computers when they are connected to the Internet. Unlike many traditional VPN connections, which must be initiated and terminated ...

for clients using Windows 7, and the addition of

DNSSEC The Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) is a suite of extension specifications by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for securing data exchanged in the Domain Name System ( DNS) in Internet Protocol ( IP) networks. The protoco ...

support for DNS Server Service. Even though DNSSEC as such is supported, only one signature algorithm is available: #5/RSA/SHA-1. Since many zones use a different algorithm – including the root zone – this means that in reality Windows still can't serve as a recursive resolver. The

DHCP The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) is a network management protocol used on Internet Protocol (IP) networks for automatically assigning IP addresses and other communication parameters to devices connected to the network using a clie ...

server supports a large number of enhancements such as

MAC address A MAC address (short for medium access control address or media access control address) is a unique identifier assigned to a network interface controller (NIC) for use as a network address in communications within a network segment. This use i ...

-based control filtering, converting active leases into reservations or

link layer In computer networking, the link layer is the lowest layer in the Internet protocol suite, the networking architecture of the Internet. The link layer is the group of methods and communications protocols confined to the link that a host is phys ...

based filters, DHCppP ''Name protection'' for non-Windows machines to prevent name squatting, better performance through aggressive lease database caching, DHCP activity logging, auto-population of certain network interface fields, a wizard for split-scope configuration, ''DHCP Server role'' migration using WSMT, support for DHCPv6 Option 15 (User Class) and Option 32 (Information Refresh Time). The DHCP server runs in the context of the ''Network Service'' account which has fewer privileges to reduce potential damage if compromised. Windows Server 2008 R2 supports up to 64 physical processors or up to 256 logical processors per system. (Only the Datacenter and Itanium editions can take advantage of the capability of 64 physical processors. Enterprise, the next-highest edition after those two, can only use 8.) When deployed in a file server role, new File Classification Infrastructure services allow files to be stored on designated servers in the enterprise based on business naming conventions, relevance to business processes and overall corporate policies.

Server Core Server Core is a minimalistic Microsoft Windows Server installation option, debuted in Windows Server 2008. Server Core provides a server environment with functionality scaled back to core server features, and because of limited features, it ha ...

includes a subset of the .NET Framework, so that some applications (including

ASP.NET ASP.NET is a server-side web-application framework designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. It was developed by Microsoft to allow programmers to build dynamic web sites, applications and services. The name stands for Ac ...

web sites and

Windows PowerShell PowerShell is a shell program developed by Microsoft for task automation and configuration management. As is typical for a shell, it provides a command-line interpreter for interactive use and a script interpreter for automation via a langua ...

2.0) can be used. Performance improvement was a major area of focus for this release; Microsoft has stated that work was done to decrease boot time, improve the efficiency of I/O operations while using less processing power, and generally improve the speed of storage devices, especially

iSCSI Internet Small Computer Systems Interface or iSCSI ( ) is an Internet Protocol-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities. iSCSI provides block-level access to storage devices by carrying SCSI commands over a TCP/IP ...

. Active Directory has several new features when raising the forest and domain functional levels to Windows Server 2008 R2: Two added features are Authentication Mechanism Assurance and Automatic SPN Management. When raising the forest functional level, the Active Directory recycle bin feature is available and can be enabled using the Active Directory Module for PowerShell.

Support lifecycle

Support for the RTM version of Windows Server 2008 R2 ended on April 9, 2013. Users had to install Service Pack 1 to continue receiving updates. On January 13, 2015, Windows Server 2008 R2 exited mainstream support and entered the extended support phase; Microsoft continued to provide security updates every month for Windows Server 2008 R2, however, free technical support, warranty claims, and design changes were no longer offered. Extended support ended on January 14, 2020, about ten years after the release of Windows Server 2008 R2. In August 2019, researchers reported that "all modern versions of Microsoft Windows" may be at risk for "critical" system compromise due to design flaws of hardware

device driver In the context of an operating system, a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls a particular type of device that is attached to a computer or automaton. A driver provides a software interface to hardware devices, enabli ...

s from multiple providers.

Itanium

Microsoft announced that Server 2008 R2 would be the last version of

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

supporting the

architecture, with extended support to end on July 10, 2018. However, monthly security updates continued until January 14, 2020, and a final unscheduled update appeared in May 2020 via

WSUS Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), previously known as Software Update Services (SUS), is a computer program and network service developed by Microsoft Corporation that enables administrators to manage the distribution of updates and hot ...

Paid extended updates

Windows Server 2008 R2 was eligible for the paid ESU (Extended Security Updates) program. This program allowed volume license customers to purchase, in yearly installments, security updates for the operating system until January 10, 2023, only for Standard, Enterprise, and Datacenter volume licensed editions. The program was included with

Microsoft Azure Microsoft Azure, or just Azure ( /ˈæʒər, ˈeɪʒər/ ''AZH-ər, AY-zhər'', UK also /ˈæzjʊər, ˈeɪzjʊər/ ''AZ-ure, AY-zure''), is the cloud computing platform developed by Microsoft. It has management, access and development of ...

purchases, and offered Azure customers an additional year of support, until January 9, 2024. Prior to the ESU program becoming available, Windows Server 2008 R2 was eligible for the now discontinued, paid Premium Assurance program (an add-on to

Microsoft Software Assurance Microsoft Software Assurance (SA) is a Microsoft maintenance program aimed at business users who use Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, and other server and . The core premise behind SA is to give users the ability to spread payments over seve ...

) available to volume license customers. Microsoft will, however, honor the program for customers who purchased it between March 2017 and July 2018 (while it was available). The program provides an extra six years of security update support, until January 13, 2026. This will mark the final end of all security updates for the Windows NT 6.1 product line after 16 years, 5 months, and 22 days. Paid extended updates are not available for

customers.

Service Pack

On February 9, 2011, Microsoft officially released Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 to OEM partners. Apart from bug fixes, it introduces two new major functions, RemoteFX and Dynamic Memory. RemoteFX enables the use of graphics hardware support for 3D graphics in a Hyper-V based VM. Dynamic Memory makes it possible for a VM to only allocate as much physical RAM as is needed temporarily for its execution. On February 16, SP1 became available for MSDN and TechNet subscribers as well as volume licensing customers. As of February 22, SP1 is generally available for download via the Microsoft Download Center and available on Windows Update.

System requirements

System requirements for Windows Server 2008 R2 are as follows: ;Processor :1.4 GHz

x86-64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit extension of the x86 instruction set architecture, instruction set. It was announced in 1999 and first available in the AMD Opteron family in 2003. It introduces two new ope ...

Itanium 2 Itanium (; ) is a discontinued family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). The Itanium architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was later jointly developed by HP and I ...

processor ;Memory :Minimum: 512 MB

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM most commonly refers to: * A male sheep * Random-access memory, computer memory * Ram Trucks, US, since 2009 ** List of vehicles named Dodge Ram, trucks and vans ** Ram Pickup, produced by Ram Trucks Ram, ram, or RAM may also ref ...

(may limit performance and some features) :Recommended: 2 GB

:Maximum: 8 GB RAM (Foundation), 32 GB RAM (Standard), or 2 TB RAM (Enterprise, Datacenter and Itanium) ;Display :

Super VGA Super VGA (SVGA) or Extended VGA is a broad term that covers a wide range of computer display standards that extended IBM's VGA specification. When used as shorthand for a resolution, as VGA and XGA often are, SVGA refers to a resolution of 800& ...

(800×600) or higher ;Disk Space Requirements :Minimum (editions higher than Foundation): 32 GB or more :Minimum (Foundation edition) 10 GB or more. :Computers with more than 16 GB of RAM require more disk space for paging and dump files. ;Other :DVD drive, keyboard and mouse, Internet access (required for updates and online

activation In chemistry and biology, activation is the process whereby something is prepared or excited for a subsequent reaction. Chemistry In chemistry, "activation" refers to the reversible transition of a molecule into a nearly identical chemical or ...

)

Editions

References

External links

Windows Server 2008 R2
on

Microsoft TechNet Microsoft TechNet was a Microsoft web portal and web service for IT professionals. It included a library containing documentation and technical resources for Microsoft products, a learning center providing online training, discussion forums, an ...

*
Convert Windows Server 2008 R2 to Workstation
{{Microsoft Windows family 2009 software X86-64 operating systems 2008 R2 Server 2008 R2 es:Windows Server 2008#Windows Server 2008 R2 ms:Windows Server 2008#Windows Server 2008 R2 sv:Windows Server 2008#Windows Server 2008 R2