Windows 8.1 and 2012 R2 Download and Install Day is Here!

The waiting is finally over. Downloads of Windows 8.1 Enterprise, Windows Server 2012 R2, and System Center 2012 R2 are live! I’m downloading the bits – all 19.2 GB – on my work PC as I type.

Actually, by the time I post this, the downloads will be complete. One of the great things about working for a major research University is we have plenty of bandwidth, so it doesn’t take very long to download files.

The Windows 8.1 Upgrade via the Store is also showing up on my home PC.

For an IT Pro in the Microsoft world, today is like Christmas in October. Sure we’ve had the RTM bits to play around with for a few weeks, but now we have the finished product (at least as finished as software can ever be). Now we can install it in production and Microsoft will support us. For me, the timing is perfect. I have four brand new Dell servers that are racked and waiting to become a Scale-Out File Server Cluster and Hyper-V Cluster. I need to have some network ports provisioned, but once that happens, I’m ready to go.

What about you? Anything in your shop that you have primed and ready to go, just waiting for those magic bits?