New and Improved
Microsoft has made some changes to several key Win2K components. The biggest enhancements are apparent in AD, Terminal Server, WMS, Win.NET Server application services, IIS 6.0, the file system and storage subsystem, and the OS's communications and networking features.
AD. In Win.NET Server, the goal for AD is refinement. Win.NET Server includes several tools to simplify AD deployment. Upgrading to Win.NET Server AD from Win2K AD is a simple in-place upgrade, and upgrading from NT 4.0 can be just as straightforward as long as you've cleaned up your NT 4.0 domain. If you haven't yet started that project, Win.NET Server includes the Active Directory Migration Tool (ADMT) 2.0 to ease the process.
New cross-forest-trust, domain-rename, and schema-reversal features address common complaints about Win2K AD. From a management standpoint, AD includes numerous UI improvements, including drag-and-drop capabilities, multiple-object selection and editing, and the ability to save queries. A full suite of AD-based command-line tools is also available.
Terminal Server. To improve Terminal Server, Win.NET Server will ship with RDP 5.2 (an upgrade to RDP 5.1, which shipped in XP). Win.NET Server also supports XP's Remote Assistance functionality. New to this release are file redirection, high-color support, resolutions of as much as 1600 * 1200, a cleaner UI, enhanced management through WMI and Group Policy, better scalability, and a new Remote Desktop client that supports execution of remote desktops within a window, a Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) browser, or an MMC console. XP users working with a Win.NET Serverbased Terminal Server will also get a handy auto-reconnect feature.
WMS. For those people who work with online training or conferencing, one of the more exciting advances in Win.NET Server is its integration of WMS, which offers a new Fast Streaming feature and dynamic content programming. WMS will work with earlier Windows Media Player (WMP) versions but works best with the upcoming Windows Media 9 Series (formerly code-named Corona) player. Win.NET Enterprise Server and Win.NET Datacenter Server include unique WMS features such as cache/proxy server support and multicast content delivery. (WMS won't be part of Win.NET Web Server.)
Application services. Essentially, Win.NET Server application services let the OS act as the middle tier of a multi-tier application and services infrastructure, handling the services that COM+, Microsoft Message Queue Services (MSMQ), and IIS have handled historically. The application services include the .NET Framework and its support for ASP.NET, ADO.NET, and related technologies. Win.NET Server ships with .NET Framework 1.1, SOAP 1.2, COM+ 1.5, and MSMQ 3.0 (which now supports SOAP messages).
IIS 6.0. By default, Win.NET Server ships with IIS disabled and reduces default privileges upon manual installation. The coolest new feature is IIS's new XML-based metabase, which you can edit live so that changes take place immediately without requiring you to restart the server. And you can use any text editor or XML-based tool to make the edits.
IIS 6.0 performance also improves dramatically. Based on pre—Release Candidate 1 (RC1) figures, IIS 6.0 offers 1.5 times the performance of IIS 5.0 on identical two-processor hardware, and 2.5 times the performance on identical four-processor hardware.
New to this release is the concept of Web gardens, which are collections of small, single-purpose Web servers. To scale up the garden, simply add new machines.
File system and storage. Win.NET Server includes various improvements to NTFS and the storage subsystem. Volume Shadow Copies, which is essentially a network-based system-restore feature, creates a volume that represents a snapshot of an existing volume, letting you access earlier versions of network files that were changed or deleted after the snapshot. The feature's required Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) represents Microsoft's first creation of a backup framework, one that third parties can extend.
Other file system and storage improvements include deep SAN support, Virtual Disk Service (VDS—for abstracting RAID systems), Automated System Recovery (ASR—which debuted in XP), and command-line disk defragmentation for any cluster size (Win2K supported only four-node clusters). Win.NET Server also provides an enhanced Chkdsk utility and improvements in NTFS scalability.
Communications and networking. Even Microsoft's earliest server products offered various communications and networking technologies. But to meet the ever-increasing importance of the Internet and interoperability, Win.NET Server supports the most recent communications technologies, including IPv6, network bridging and Internet Connection Sharing (ICS), IP Security (IPSec), NAT transversal, and IP over FireWire.
Looking Forward
Microsoft delivered Win.NET Server RC1 in late July and expects to ship Release Candidate 2 (RC2) sometime this fall. The company plans to complete product development by the end of this year and ship the product to customers in first quarter 2003. The completion of Win.NET Server will trigger a new round of Microsoft .NET Enterprise Servers, all of which the company plans to infuse with support for XML Web services. Barry Goffe, group product manager for Enterprise Marketing Strategy, said that Microsoft plans to rework future versions of the Windows Server family, the .NET Enterprise Servers, Windows desktop versions, and even Microsoft Office around the concept of XML Web services.
The upcoming Longhorn release will include support for Intel's 64-bit Itanium family and will support two to four other 64-bit platforms, including the AMD Opteron, said Brian Valentine, senior vice president of Microsoft's Windows Division. Valentine wouldn't elaborate on which other 64-bit platforms the company is evaluating but did say that the supported platforms would be only high-volume, alluding to problems Microsoft had supporting alternative architectures, such as MIPS and PowerPC, on NT 4.0. Longhorn will also feature more managed code in both client and server versions.
The Bottom Line
Win.NET Server is a surprisingly full-featured release. Building on WinK Server, the new OS will be a simple in-place upgrade for Win2K customers. And thanks to its new upgrade features, Win.NET Server should prove to be a simpler upgrade than Win2K for NT Server 4.0 holdouts, though we'll have to test that functionality before passing final judgment.
My recommendation for this release depends largely on your requirements. Existing Win2K Server customers should skip Win.NET Server unless it provides some important, specific functionality that Win2K doesn't. (For example, merging companies might want to take advantage of the new cross-forest-trust and domain-renaming features to avoid time-consuming and costly domain rebuilding.) NT Server 4.0 users should carefully evaluate this release and seriously consider upgrading to Win.NET Server.
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