It doesn’t require CALs (hooray), but most everything else is a “booo”.

There’s a 15-user limit, and the server can’t have more than one processor socket and 8Gb of RAM. Oh yes, and there is no Hyper-V either. And AD has been nadgered too, of course.

Apparently this is ideal for small businesses who need basic file and print sharing.

Well, maybe it should have been called “Waste of Time” rather than “Foundation”.

Small businesses today have a file share – it’s called a NAS box. They have a printer share – it’s called the print queue on their Ethernetted HP LaserJets. DHCP comes from their ADSL router, and DNS comes from their ISP via the router.

What small business users really needed was a fully Hyper-V integrated server offering, coupled to a hard disk solution which supported the disk-imaging technology found, for example, in Vista Ultimate. A server which keeps the data fully protected and able to be recovered in a few minutes from an image snapshot. Insanely simple, quick and easy.

Microsoft bringing a bare-metal OS to market in 2009 which doesn’t run in a VM by default, or come with VM support, and thus throws away all that superb DR capability? Give me a break, MS, this is pathetic.

I now find out of course, that VMWare Server isn’t officially supported on Windows Server 2008. Beta 2.0 is but that’s a whole different world, and I need Bowie, Iggy and friends to run without hassle. Searching in the usual places produces a load of whingers who don’t see why it can’t work, and almost nobody who really has the inside track…

…and one completely crazy fix. The problem is, Windows Sever 2008 won’t run with unsigned drivers, unless you press F8 on startup and choose the option which – well, runs without checking driver signing. There is no way to automate this within Windows: you can automate the opposite, so it never runs an unsigned driver: but you can’t turn the check off.

Well, unless you use ReadyDriverPlus that is. It’s not so much the need for somethign like this: it’s how it does it. Registry patch? Nah. Group Policy template? uh-uh.

It stuffs the keyboard buffer in the pre-GUI startup phase, to push in an F8 and the required number of up-arrows (plus a return) to always start server 2008 in unsigned driver mode.

How mad is that?

(and it works too…)