Update: RSAT is ready for download.

The Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) Beta is now available for participants of the Windows Beta program. This tool set will replace the famous Windows Server 2003 Administration Tools Pack aka Adminpak. It allows you to remotely manage a Windows server without logging on via RDP.

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23 great free Windows management utilities have been submitted. Thanks a lot! Since it is a bit cumbersome for you to check whenever there is a new tool, I will post the new submissions in an article every now and then. This post contains all the tools submitted so far, but if you want to link to them, you should take the original article because that will be updated continuously.

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I have been reviewing ADMX Migrator some time ago. This free Microsoft tool isn’t just useful to migrate your ADM files to ADMX templates. In my view, its biggest value is that you can create and edit Group Policy templates with a GUI tool without having to deal with XML. That is you won’t have to see one single angle bracket. There are no revolutionary new features in the version 1.2. But I would recommend getting it anyway since it also fixes some bugs.

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Can’t wait to try the performance boost that Service Pack 3 brings for Windows XP? Then you can download XP SP1 right now with this little hack.

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Some days ago I blogged about a questionable performance test of Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista. The same organizations just tested the performance of Windows XP SP3. The “Researchers” wrote that they measured a “performance boost” of, well, 10%.

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I wrote a review about VMRCPlus a while ago. It is a nifty free tool from Microsoft that can replace the Web interface of Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1. VMRCPlus has a graphical user interface that allows you to manage Virtual Server in a much more convenient way than with the original Web-based user interface. Version 1.6 has some new interesting features.

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You can now download the service packs for the .NET Framework:

.NET 2.0 SP1 x86
.NET SP1 x64
.NET 3.0 SP1

They were already released two days ago. I find it interesting that almost nobody seems to care about it. I mean, if you compare it with the stir that Vista SP1 has already caused . When Microsoft introduced .NET, I got the impression that in the future the underlying OS won’t play such an important role anymore. It seems that this is not going to happen any time soon.

I would like to create a list of the best free tools for Windows administrators. For this, I need your help. My own list is probably not representative and I am sure there are many great utilities I have never heard of. So if you know one or two great admin tools and you can spare a little of your precious time, then you could fill out the form below. Every tool will be listed as soon I had to time to check if the submission isn’t just SPAM.

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The exo.performance.network tested Vista with the beta of service pack 1. Many organizations are waiting for SP1 in the hope that it will solve all the problems they had with Vista. One issue that is often discussed in this context is performance. To come straight to the point: According to their test result Vista SP1 is not faster than Vista RTM.

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There seems to be a new version of Windows Server 2008. Desmond reports that in the Windows Server 2008 Nov CTP, the license agreement mentions “RC1″. I suppose that means that Windows 2008 is now feature complete. I just checked the official download site. It still offers RC0. So only the privileged testers have access to the latest version. But, I guess, it won’t take too long until RC1 will be available to the public. I think that Microsoft gets on well with Windows 2008. I am playing with it since Beta 2, and all in all it makes a much more stable impression to me than Vista at this development stage.

Keith Comb created some great screencasts about Server Core. If you are wondering how one can configure a Windows server without windows, then you should have a look at this nice introduction to Server Core. Actually, it is not really without windows. You’ll see that you can still use graphical tools to manage Sever Core. If you are more of the type who likes to read instead of watching, you might want to check out my post about the essentials of Server Core and my introduction to Server Core.

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Since Vista has been available for about a year now, more and more journalists are trying to figure out if Vista is a success or not. Today, I read a couple of interesting articles about Vista’s adoption pace.

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Microsoft offers an update that allows you to manage WSUS 3.0 SP1 with Server Manager. I think this is the first non-Windows Server 2008 product that can be integrated in Server Manager. It seems that Microsoft is indeed copying the concept of Linux management tools such as SuSE’s yast.

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Microsoft detailed Windows Server 2008 prices. Compared to Windows Server 2003, they increased by 1% only. If you take inflation into account, then one has to admit that Windows Server got cheaper. This is interesting if you relate it to the price raise of Windows Vista.

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Microsoft’s marketing makes a somewhat confused impression to me. Now, that we are already used to “Windows Server Virtualization (WSV)“, they come up with the new product names Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server. Note that WSV was not a code name; this was Viridian. Most interesting in this announcement certainly is the new product Hyper-V Server.

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