Service Pack 2 for Vista and Windows Server 2008 on the way?

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Michael Pietroforte

Michael Pietroforte is the founder and editor in chief of 4sysops. He has more than 35 years of experience in IT management and system administration.

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This article discusses a beta release of a Microsoft product. The information in this article is provided as-is and is subject to change without notice.

The following introduction is a bit disappointing, though:

This Microsoft Knowledge Base article will be updated with more information about Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 (SP2) and Windows Vista Service Pack 2 (SP2) when the information becomes available. Currently, the product release notes and related information about Windows Server 2008 SP2 and Windows Vista SP2 are not available.

As usual, in KB articles, one is asked at the end if this information was relevant. Guess how I answered…  ;-). Perhaps this placeholder indicates that the release date for the betas for Vista SP2 and Server 2008 SP2 isn’t far away. I checked Microsoft Connect and MSDN, but so far, there is no SP2 in sight.
Just in case you are wondering how you could have missed SP1 for Server 2008 - there never was one. When Server 2008 was released, Microsoft decided to name its new server OS Windows Server 2008 SP1 because it shared the code base with Vista SP1.

One the one hand, this makes things easier, because they can now refer to THE Service Pack 2 in documentation,  independently of the Vista and Server 2008 edition. On the other hand, this might give admins the wrong impression; namely that the current Server 2008 code already benefitted from public feedback in server environments.

However, the fact that there is just one placeholder article for Vista and Server 2008 leads me to wonder if there will also be only one Service Pack 2 installation file for both operating systems. In this case, the somewhat unusual naming of the first release of Server 2008 would really make sense.