Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008 R2 represents a significant milestone in Microsoft's ongoing efforts to help customers streamline the management of their unique IT infrastructures. This white paper begins with a brief discussion of today's IT management challenges. It discusses many new and improved management consoles that help centralize management tasks and enable IT pros work more efficiently. It introduces Windows Deployment Services and Windows Server Migration Guides, which can help ensure that organizations can respond quickly to their changing IT infrastructure needs. It covers the Best Practices Analyzer and Windows Reliability and Performance Monitor which can help identify and resolve problems resulting from configuration changes. And it introduces Windows PowerShell™ which can help standardize and automate all your management processes.