Windows Server 2008

Windows Server 2008 is the server counterpart of Windows Vista, which was released on 27 February 2008, a little over a year after its client counterpart. It replaces Windows Server 2003 and was replaced by Windows Server 2008 R2. It was the first version of Windows Server to include Hyper-V and also the last version of Windows Server to ship with the x86 architecture.

This is the first version of Windows Server that lacks support for systems without ACPI, as it will display a black screen with error messages when launched.

Hardware compatibility
Intel CPUs whose microarchitectures are based on Haswell or later are not supported on Windows Server 2008. Numerous issues relating to certain services or applications failing to start on the affected CPUs have been reported by various users, with extreme cases often leading to potential bugchecks. The KB4493471 update contains a HAL driver that fixes most of these issues.

Windows Server 2003 and earlier operating systems are not affected by the above mentioned problems.

Development reset
These builds are also referred to as Omega-13 builds.