VS 2008 launch information for MSDN Subscribers, as well as Download Manager issues - new DLM expected later today

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As you may have seen on blog and forum posts, Microsoft is using two content delivery networks for delivery of bits to MSDN and TechNet Subscribers with the intent that this will increase availability and reliability of downloads and balance loads between the systems during the high demand periods following last weeks VS 2008 launch.

In the first week of the VS2008 launch, there have been roughly 35,000 successful downloads from Akamai and another 30,000 successful downloads of Visual Studio editions from the classic MSDN Subscriber Downloads platform.

Combined bandwidth for the two systems has hit 10 GB/sec. We have been monitoring the health of the systems against the loads and added additional products to one or the other or both in response to system health and reliability.

We have had the Akamai delivery mechanism in place since April 2007 but had not had the level of usage or reporting of access issues that we saw last week with the VS2008 issues. Many of the issues appear to be Vista specific, so the increase in issues likely correlates with increases in Vista adoption.

A new FTM was also launched in October/November timeframe for use with the classic Subscriber Downloads system. That new version addressed some Vista specific issues as well as other items in advance of the VS2008 and other high visibility launch waves.

We have been working with the Akamai team since issues came up last week with the VS2008 launch. They released a patch of one painful issue within hours of it being identified.

We continued to work with the Akamai team over the Thanksgiving Holiday weekend and they have a new version of the Akamai Download Manager that we expect will be launched today - addressing another five or six issues - mostly related to Vista and IE7 usability.

We know of at least one more issue that they are continuing to work on related to pausing and restarting downloads after an extended time window has gone by. This will likely require another DLM client install (ActiveX) as well to resolve. No ETA on this yet.

We are expecting that the version coming out later today addresses five or six issues related to download success on Vista and/or IE7. As additional issues come to our attention, we add them to the Top Subscriber Downloads FAQ as known issues and include solutins or work arounds if we have them.