So far so good; up and running. I can tell you strait up that this was one of the smoothest installations I've done on a new OS, and I had very low expectations after Vista. I will be putting Vista on the back shelf (or perhaps just as a virtual machine play toy) for awhile. This is an older machine but after installing the initial drivers for the SATA HD controller the installation was one click and sit back and watch.
no background image so I made my own. 
Here's the rig:
Current Server Roles:
- Basic File Server (still need to play with the Distributed File System - DFS)
- Media Server; BTW you have to install this as a down load for 2008. You can find it Here. Have an error I will have to look into "The plug-in 'WMS Advanced FF/RW Format Media Parser' cannot be loaded on this version of Windows." But, the test streams work when I checked.
- Web Server
I have to say I am very impressed at how roles and sub functions of roles are broken up and and managed in the Server Manager. The operations, monitoring, and role changes are very much improved over WS 2003.
Screen shot of the new Server Manager looking at roles:
Software installed:
- Office 2008
- SQL Server 2008 CPT 5 (Pre-release)
- Visual Studio 2008
- Paint .Net (Fantastic free picture editing utility built on .Net)
- Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1.
- This vision fixes the problem(s) with IIS7 that became a show stopper for Vista users. Nice to have this working when I found out the Hyper-V was not supported (guessing it's a multi-core thing) on this system and since it is still in RC I'm guessing I have a bit to save some change for a new CPU.
- Live Messenger and Live Writer
- Ran into problems here. If you go to the Live site and run their installer Wlinstaller.exe it craps out and you get an error message:
The short of the problem is that this installer is the front-end program to download the latest version of Live products then launches their .msi files. Daniel Oxley documents the problem here. The easy fix for me was to go to one of my XP machines that had Live Writer and Messenger installed on it and find the .msi files then run it on this machine. A very stupid problem if you ask me and one that has been known for a while and yet to be fixed; which probably means it is intentional for some bizarre reason. After all what system admin would ever want to be instant messaged or blog?
Overall I would say the ramp-up time if you know your way around Windows Server 2003 looks to be minimal, however I have yet to set this machine up for any domain controller roles. The UI is basically Vista minimalist. I have yet to look at Vista SP1 and I suspect that the differences that I see from Vista to W2k8 is the SP1 features such as the different download interface. BTW this fresh install of W2k8 identifies itself as Windows Server 2008 SP1.
Here's a pretty comprehensive overview and review I found on ZDNet Australia.
You can down load the trial, look at the Virtual Labs, and download the virtual machine for W2K8 Here.
Next on my agenda is to get DNN 4.82 up and running under IIS7 and VS2008.
L8R,
Addendum:
The Reliability and Performance Monitor (Technet Info) is very sweet:
Really looking forward to SBS 2008, came accross this video, I guess the SBS and EBS versions are going to British:
