Arstechnica reports that Microsoft wants to prove the reliability of its new server OS Windows Server 2008 by switching their site Microsoft.com to Windows Server 2008 servers powered by IIS 7. Note that WS2008 is still in the Beta phase so Microsoft has put a lot of faith on their product. Microsoft is not the only early switcher though, Netcraft monitors the market share of servers OS and reports that there are already 2600 sites running WS2008, mainly developers and hosting companies testing the product.

Eric Woersching’s blog has an interesting article about the transition, including a 38 minute video interview with Microsoft’s Operation Manager, and some statistics:

Microsoft.com is the 5^th most trafficked site in the world, 4^th most in the US. The site is supported by roughly 80 Web servers delivering content daily to around 287M unique users via +300k concurrent connections at a rate of over 10k requests per second. Despite such a heavy load, Microsoft.com is consistently the #1 most available site on the Internet as measured by Keynote. The Operations team for MSCom had been playing with IIS7 since its early beta builds and recently finished deploying the new Web server in Windows Server 2008 Beta 3 to all its production servers.

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