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Boasting management and performance improvements for its core file and identity-service duties—along with broadened support for Unix—Microsoft Corp.s Windows Server 2003 Release 2 is a worthwhile upgrade, particularly for organizations running the operating system in remote-office scenarios or in heterogeneous environments.
Click here to read the full review of Windows Server 2003 Release 2.
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Boasting management and performance improvements for its core file and identity-service duties—along with broadened support for Unix—Microsoft Corp.s Windows Server 2003 Release 2 is a worthwhile upgrade, particularly for organizations running the operating system in remote-office scenarios or in heterogeneous environments.
Windows Server 2003 R2 is priced from $999 for the Standard Edition to $3,999 for the Enterprise Edition. Customers of Microsofts Software Assurance subscription program will be able to upgrade to R2 for no extra cost, but Windows servers that arent covered under Software Assurance will require a new full license for the upgrade. Windows 2003 Server client access licenses do not have to be upgraded for use with R2.
One licensing change that we were pleased to see in R2 is the provision enabling users to run as many as four virtual instances of Windows Server R2 on an R2 Enterprise Edition host without additional license fees.
For the full avalanche of Windows Server license and pricing information, go to www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/howtobuy/
licensing/default.mspx. A 180-day evaluation version of R2 is available for free download at technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/r2.mspx, along with a bounty of product information documents and Webcasts.
Windows Server 2003 R2 comes in versions for the x86 and x86-64 processor architectures. eWEEK Labs tested the 32-bit version of R2 on one of our white-box machines running a 2.2GHz Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Athlon 64 processor and 1GB of RAM. We used this box as a domain controller, with a couple of Windows Server 2003 member servers running as virtual machines on a separate piece of hardware.
R2 is delivered as an update that sits atop Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1. The R2 components fit on one CD, while another CD contains Windows Server 2003 SP1.
When we upgraded one of our Windows Server SP1 boxes to R2, we werent prompted to restart, nor were all of R2s components immediately installed on our system. Rather, when we visited the Manage Your Server dialog after our R2 upgrade, roles that we had already configured on our newly upgraded server included an option for upgrading to the new R2 functionality.
Share and share alike
In the “Wish List for Windows” story that ran in our recent Windows 20th anniversary issue (Nov. 14, 2005), we pined for better interoperability with Unix-flavored operating systems. We were therefore pleased to see that R2 has taken significant steps in this direction: Microsoft has folded its Services for Unix tools, which had been available for Windows Server as a separate install, into R2, along with performance and functionality improvements.
Out of the box, R2 can now perform both as a client and a server of NFS (Network File System) shares. While Samba enables Unix and Linux machines to serve and consume Windows-native SMB protocol shares, NFS is the native file-sharing protocol for Unix and Linux, and it can often be easier to share files from and with these systems using NFS.
We had trouble setting up our R2 box as a client for an NFS share wed configured on Apple Computer Inc.s Mac OS X Server 10.4, but we had no problem using R2 as an NFS server. We could share the same folder with NFS and SMB, for maximum availability for a heterogeneous client base.
One complication we ran into with our NFS sharing experiments involved permissions—specifically, the ways that the permissions schemes in Windows and Linux differ. Helpfully, R2s interoperability improvements include tools for managing authentication between Windows and Linux or Unix.
On a simpler note, we could opt to map specific user names on our Unix systems to others on Windows. We also could sync user names and groups using password and group files from our Linux machine; for a larger deployment, we could sync an NIS (Network Information Service) server with Active Directory.
Next Page: More efficient management
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Microsoft is positioning R2 as a boon for branch offices and smaller sites that share data with larger, central sites—both for collaboration and for backup.
In service to these scenarios, R2 ships with a much-improved DFS (Distributed File System). With R2, Windows Servers DFS gets a rewritten file replication engine—one thats built around a technology that Microsoft is calling RDC, or Remote Differential Compression. RDC is a big advance for Windows Server and DFS because, when synchronizing files, it only transmits the differences among the files and not the files themselves.
This can mean big savings in network use and time, particularly where small changes are concerned, such as changing a title or a few bullet points on a large presentation document. R2 also enabled us to set up our DFS replication operations for particular days and hours of the week and to throttle DFS network use during scheduled times.
Along similar lines, R2 features improvements to the namespace functionality of DFS, which lets administrators present to users a collection of shared folders located on different servers under a virtual tree, or namespace. In R2, this feature has been extended to enable administrators to set the failover priorities for servers participating in a namespace. Combined with R2s DFS replication functionality, the systems namespace facilities can provide graceful failover when participant file servers—or the network links that connect them—become unavailable.
We were able to configure R2s DFS replication and namespace capabilities through the systems revamped graphical administration tools, which are built on top of a new, 3.0 version of MMC (Microsoft Management Console). The DFS management console served us well both as a platform for organizing and configuring replication and namespace groups and as a portal to the systems help documentation on those capabilities.
Also new in R2 and built on MMC 3.0 is a management component for all file server administration operations (with the DFS console included as a plug-in). The file server management interface included a Scenarios dropdown menu that listed more than 20 file server administrator tasks. For each task, the console offers a description, a step-by-step list for completing the task and a link to additional help information.
One quibble we had with R2s file server management console during tests was that it didnt include the NFS shares wed set up among those listed in the Shared Folders plug-in. Wed like to be able to manage NFS shares using the same tools as for SMB shares.
Another piece of R2s file server management console that we appreciated was its File Server Resource Manager, another MMC 3.0 plug-in that provided us with tools for applying and managing quotas, screening particular types of files, and scheduling and generating reports on our file server usage.
The quota tool comes with six template quotas, and we could create our own, as well. The file screening tool let us prevent users from saving files with particular extensions. Users could avoid this screening by simply choosing permitted extensions, but R2s screening feature should still prove helpful for administrators working to keep control over the files theyre storing.
Next page: Evaluation Shortlist: Related Products.
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Evaluation Shortlist
Apples Mac OS X Server 10.4 The Apple operating system does rival Windows Server 2003 in the ease of use of its management tools, but the limited hardware on which OS X runs is a big drawback (www.apple.com)
Novell Inc.s SuSE Enterprise Linux Server 9 and Red Hat Inc.s Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 These enterprise Linux distros offer a bit broader architecture support than does Windows Server, but they dont match the breadth of R2s software catalog or the smoothness of its graphical management tools (www.novell.com and www.redhat.com)
Sun Microsystems Inc.s Solaris 10 Suns Solaris 10 is more constrained in terms of supported hardware and software than Windows Server is, but Solaris boasts some slick and useful technologies, such as DTrace and Containers, that Windows does not (www.sun.com)
Senior Analyst Jason Brooks can be reached at jason_brooks@ziffdavis.com.
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