Note: This review has been updated
for the final release of Windows Server 2003.
Joining several colleges from Windows & .NET Magazine at a late June 2002 Reviewer's Workshop for Windows Server 2003 near Microsoft's Redmond headquarters, I received an almost mind-numbingly technical overview to the vast array of new features in the company's next server operating system. After this barrage of information, subsequent meetings with Microsoft, and months of work with Windows Server 2003, one thing is clear: Windows Server has grown up dramatically since the early NT days, and it now scales up to the most scalable and advanced hardware on the planet.
It wasn't always that way. Early versions of NT Server met with much market resistance, mostly because of the system's poor performance and low-end aspirations. So it wasn't until the release of Windows 2000 Server in February 2000 that Microsoft had a credible enterprise solution. "Windows NT 4 was all about small teams of people," said Cliff Reeves, Microsoft's Vice President of Product Management for Windows Server 2003. "Windows 2000 was focused on being a robust OS suitable for the data center. Windows Server improves on Windows 2000 and NT and introduces developer and application server capabilities. It's the tip of the iceberg for what's coming in the future on the server."
Name gamesWindows Server 2003 wasn't the original name for this product family. Here are the other names Microsoft publicly touted.
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Windows Server 2003 is so vast, so--dare I say it--rich, that it's hard to summarize quickly. Indeed, Microsoft is still grappling with the problem of describing Windows Server 2003 accurately to its customers. Reeves might have put it best when he told us that Windows Server 2003 was "a bloody good Windows 2000 version. That?s the basic Zen of what it is. It's all the things we learned, all the ideas encapsulated in a whole series of improvements. It's more secure, more manageable, more performance, more scalable. It's a kick ass Windows 2000 upgrade."
Clearly, Reeves is right. But Windows Server 2003 is also like death by a thousand small cuts: One just doesn't know where to begin, and it's easy to get lost in all the confusion of new features. In a general sense, Windows Server 2003 is simply Microsoft's latest and greatest attempt to scale what had been a departmental and workgroup server ever higher into the domain of Big Iron and high-end UNIX. And if you can accept that Windows 2000 finally put Microsoft on the enterprise map, it's not a big leap to see that Windows Server 2003 may finally overcome what little perceived advantage the competition might still have. "We want to bring PC economics to the data center," Reeves said. "We will bring the costs down, make it less expensive to acquire and manage technology, and hack away at the high cost parts of today's data center. We talk to customers about dropping the cost of managing and deploying infrastructure. Windows is seen as an inevitability in the data center now. We have bigger machines, better technology, and higher scale. The key to Windows' value is its incredible focus on the value side. What do you do above that level makes people more productive."
OK, so what do you get with Windows Server 2003? First, you're getting the results of two and a half years of improvements over Windows 2000, and the benefits of customer feedback from both NT 4 and 2000. Bill Veghte, the Corporate Vice President of Windows Server Management at Microsoft, told us that the company looked at tens of thousands of customer inputs and drove improvements based on that feedback into the product.
"Windows Server 2003 is a kick ass Windows 2000 upgrade."-Cliff Reeves
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That last one, incidentally, caused some puzzled looks. Veghte was talking about federation, a new Microsoft buzz word used to describe user authentication across disparate systems. Federation basically became a hot topic when Microsoft's partners rejected the Passport centralized user database strategy called .NET My Services and asked the company to instead develop server products that would let them keep their customer and user data in-house. Federated servers will eventually permit external authentication so that enterprises can interoperate with other companies. Microsoft announced this strategy, code-named TrustBridge, in June 2002 and expects to roll out a corresponding server product of some sort in 2003 (See my WinInfo article for more information).
Windows Server 2003 is available in a much wider range of products than was Windows 2000 Server. The mainstream 32-bit products include:
Optimized solely for serving and hosting Web pages, Windows Server 2003, Web Edition supports 2 processors and up to 2 GB of RAM. Web Edition supports the .NET Framework, IIS 6, ASP.NET, Network Load Balancing (NLB), IPv6, Distributed File System (Dfs), Encrypting File System (EFS), Shadow Copy Restore, Print Services for UNIX, IntelliMirror, Resultant Set of Policy (RSoP), Windows Instrumentation Management (WMI) command line features, Remote OS installation (but not RIS), Internet Connection Firewall (ICF), and Remote Desktop. Web Edition can be a member server in an Active Directory (AD) domain, but cannot be a domain controller, and thus lacks much of the management infrastructure found in the other editions.
Web Server Edition is fairly limited and doesn't include
many of the management tools found in the other editions.
The core product for small and medium-sized businesses, Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition also supports 2 processors, but can handle up to 4 GB of RAM. Standard Edition includes all of the technologies in Web Edition, plus Enterprise UDDI Services, Internet Authentication Services (IAS), removable and remote storage, Fax Service, Services for Macintosh, Remote Installation Services (RIS), Windows Media Services (WMS), Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), Certificate Services, Smart Card support, and Terminal Services.
Targeted as the new high volume Windows Server product, Enterprise Edition supports 4-8 processors, 32 GB of RAM, and up to 8-node clusters. A 64-bit version with different specifications is also available (see below). Enterprise Edition is a superset of Standard Edition, adding Metadirectory Services Support (MMS) and Terminal Services Session Directory features, and support for hot-add memory and Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA).
Microsoft's performance champion is aimed at the upper end of the market, with exclusive availability and scalability enhancements. Datacenter Edition supports 8 to 32 microprocessors, 64 GB of RAM, and up to 8-node clusters. A 64-bit version with different specifications is also available (see below). Datacenter is functionally equivalent to Enterprise Edition, though it lacks the Metadirectory Services Support (MMS) and Internet Connection Firewall features, but of course adds support for the Datacenter Program (DCP).
In June 2001, Microsoft began offering a limited distribution Windows Server 2003 Edition
dubbed Windows Advanced Server, Limited Edition (WASLE).
WASLE is a 64-bit product designed to take advantage of
the first generation Itanium platform, or IA-64, which
also shipped last summer, and Microsoft has recently shipped an upgrade that targets Itanium 2. This product
will be superceded by Windows Server
2003, 64-bit Enterprise Edition and Windows Server
2003, 64-bit Datacenter Edition in April 2003, and both versions will support the
Itanium and Itanium 2 processors. Enterprise-64 supports
up to 64 GB of RAM, 8 processors, and up to 8-node
clusters. Datacenter-64 supports 512MB to 256 GB of RAM
(though most systems will probably be physically
constrained to 128 GB initially), 8 to 32 processors,
and 8-node clusters. Interestingly, the 32-processor
limit on Datacenter-64 is pretty artificial, since
32-proc machines are currently only in the planning
stages. But Microsoft says it could easily scale
Datacenter-64 beyond 32 processors if the hardware was
there today.
The 64-bit products, of course, will see fairly limited
deployments during the Windows Server 2003 product lifetime,
thanks to the ever-scaling capabilities and performance
of the IA-32 (x86) platform and the high prices on
64-bit hardware solutions. But getting the 64-bit
products out there is an important step for Microsoft,
because that market will someday surpass the 32-bit
products. "Eventually everything will be 64-bit," Brian
Valentine, the Senior Vice President of Microsoft's
Windows Division told me. "The computing world will move
there over time. But it's going to take many, many
years."
While I'm going to wait for some hands-on time with Windows Server Release Candidate 1 (RC1) before providing feedback about my experience with the product, I will at least address the broad strokes of new functionality you can expect. "Our vision for the server is that it is a foundation for connecting people, technology and businesses," Veghte said. "It is a platform for developing, deploying, and operating applications and services that federate seamlessly and scale without limits."
Here are some of the major new features in Windows Server 2003.
OK, the abilities term is buzzword-friendly enough to be trying at times, but there's some truth to it. As Microsoft is so fond of pointing out, its server products are continually improving in reliability, availability, scalability, and manageability, though I'll cover that one a bit later, as well as interoperability. The idea is that Windows Server needed to be improved enough in these areas to be accepted into the data center, and while Windows 2000 got them a foot in the door, Windows Server 2003 will, theoretically at least, break the door down completely. One imagines Sun administrators running for cover. Well, Brian Valentine does anyway. Having met the man now, I'm sure of it.
"Customers have two key questions," said Jim
Livingston, the Lead Program Manager for Windows
Datacenter Server. "First, is Windows really ready for
mission critical work? And secondly, how can I determine
why there is downtime so I don't have reboot and just
hope it doesn?t happen again?" To tackle these problems,
Microsoft looked at the downtime statistics for Windows
2000. According to Livingston, 76 percent of Win2K
downtime is planned, while 24 percent is unplanned.
To handle the top two downtime issues--OS
upgrade/Service Pack/Hot-fix and OS reconfiguration,
Microsoft made core feature changes to Windows Server 2003.
Most OS upgrades, including QFE/Hot-fixes, will no
longer require a server reboot. Furthermore, Microsoft
now supports the ability to chain QFEs so that you can
install them in a single step, again without the need to
reboot. The number one remaining cause of the so-called
Blue Screen of death (BSOD), or more simply, blue
screen--which, admittedly, is fairly rare on Windows
2000 systems--was removed via improvement to the driver
verifier, which has been completely reengineered. And
new problem tracking technologies--including a Shutdown
Event Tracker--provide proactive help to figure out why
the system is being rebooted and what can be done to
prevent it. Microsoft is including its Reliability
Service--previously used only in-house--in Windows Server 2003 so that customers can optionally gather
reliability data from their servers, analyze the data,
and obtain a reliability and availability report.
Technically, even the more reliable server is of no
use if clients can't access it. So Windows Server 2003s must be
available as well. Availability is achieved through
clustering and failover technologies, of course, and
problem avoidance techniques. Clustering has been
improved from 4 nodes in Win2K to 8 nodes in this
release. But clustering is also easier to set up than
before, thanks to friendly wizards and proactive tools
that will sense when a cluster is improperly configured
and correct any problems.
Windows Server 2003 implements fault tolerance features
through memory mirroring support, ensuring that no
memory failure will bring down the system; Hot Plug PCI
technology for adding PCI cards without shutting down
the server; Hot Add Memory, for adding memory (but not
removing it; that will be implemented in Longhorn); load
balancing and failover; and multi-path IO for storage. Windows Server 2003's support for Storage Area Networks (SANs)
is also improved, and its now possible to implement a
SAN-based file system without drive letters.
The Windows scalability challenge remains unchanged
from Windows 2000: Microsoft wants Windows computers to
be the top performing computers in the world. And make
no mistake about the company's goals for world
domination: It wants Windows Server to win every single
performance benchmark. But with Win2K, there were still
two major customer concerns: They wanted more hardware
choices on the very high end, and wanted proof that
Windows could scale as high as UNIX.
To address these concerns, Windows Server 2003 supports up to
256 GB of RAM, and technologies such as hyperthreading
and NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Architecture), which allows
Windows Servers to be partitioned like a mainframe. More
importantly for most Microsoft customers, perhaps, is
that the 32-bit products can work in systems with up to
32 processors. "And we can move forward from 32-proc
support," Livingston said. "That's a limitation of
today's hardware, not Windows."
"Interoperability is the key to surviving and thriving. It's a big change for Microsoft. We used to ask customers to throw everything else out."-Barry Goffe
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Historically, Microsoft has had a pretty weak
interoperability story, due largely to the omnipresent
mentality that all the machines in every network would
be running Windows. However, the company now embraces
the notion that heterogeneous platforms will
interoperate using Web services and open standards such
as XML and SOAP. So Windows Server 2003 is the first
Microsoft server OS to fully embrace this new vision.
"Interoperability is the key to surviving and thriving,"
said Barry Goffe, the Group Manager for Enterprise
Marketing Strategy. "It's a big change for Microsoft. We
used to ask customers to throw everything else out."
As noted previously, Microsoft's interoperability story
revolves almost solely around Web services, and of
course, the company is working to get its .NET
technologies as widely adopted as possible.
Also, in the event that this isn't obvious, the 32-bit
and 64-bit Windows Server 2003 products are completely
interoperable. The systems don't appear differently on a
network in any way.
Microsoft security may be an oxymoron today, but the
company is undergoing a dramatic change in the way it
approaches security, and Windows Server 2003 will be the
first major OS release from the company that was
produced in the wake of its Trustworthy Computing code
review, which occurred in February-March 2002. "Windows Server is secure by design, secure by default, and
secure in deployment," Veghte said.
Windows Server 2003 includes a secure VPN gateway, a new
secure wireless standard called 802.1x, and a
standards-based TCP/IP infrastructure, including support
for DNS, DHCP, NAT, and IPv6.
"If you're not secure, you're not a player," said
Praerit Garg, the Group Program Manager for Windows
Security. Garg highlighted the secure defaults in Windows Server 2003, which provide a significantly reduced
attack surface: IIS 6 is not enabled by default, and
over 20 other services are now turned off by default,
when compared to Windows 2000. Microsoft reduced the
privileges for some services, including NetworkService
and LocalService. There are stronger ACL and policy
default settings, and blank password attacks have been
eliminated. That is, no network authentication is
provided for accounts with blank passwords.
The Web Server Security Lockdown Wizard has actually
been replaced since this build.
Why? Because IIS is
locked down before you even run the
wizard.
To protect systems after deployment, a new Software
Restriction Policies (SRP) feature lets administrators
determine which applications can--and can not--execute
in their environment. Windows Server 2003 also supports
Smartcard technologies, so that admins can logon with a
normal account but swipe the card when they need to
perform secure administrative tasks under admin
privileges.
Locking down IIS and other services was eye-opening, the
company says. "The first thing we discovered when we
locked down the server was that no applications worked,"
Brian Valentine told us. "They needed IIS or whatever.
It was definitely a compatibility issue. But we learned
a lot by locking down the server. Our general
vision--the focus on general purpose computing OSes--is
deployment-specific. As you install it, you can choose
the mode you want to run in and we will configure it for
you as well as we can. But we want it to be secure by
default, and if you mess with something, you should be
told about it: 'This is the risk. This is the exposure
are you taking.' The system will get that knowledgeable,
but the couplings between system behaviors need to be
tightened up first."
Even Microsoft's earliest server products, of
course, offered various communications and networking
technologies. But with the ever-increasing importance of
the Internet and interoperability, Windows Server
2003 has been enhanced to support the latest communications
technologies, including IPv6, network bridging and
Internet Connection Sharing (ICS), IPSec, NAT
transversal, IP over Firewire, and so on.
One of the Windows Server 2003 communications goals was inspired
by the way Microsoft employees often work from home.
"Remote access is so common now that all previous
dial-up users are now using VPN (Virtual Private
Networking) at Microsoft, said Windows Server Group
Product Manager Ron Cully. "There's also a lot in Windows Server 2003 to address how wireless network access
works."
Microsoft's move to Active Directory (AD) directory
services in Windows 2000 has met with mixed results,
though most customers agree that AD is surprisingly
full-featured for a 1.0 product. In Windows Server
2003,
the goal for AD is refinement, and to ensure that they
get it right, 240 of Microsoft's 250 domain controllers
are already running Windows Server 2003 beta code (fun fact:
The other 10 are using Windows 2000 for interoperability
testing reasons only).
The main complaint from Win2K AD was that it could be
easier to deploy, so Microsoft has built a number of
tools that ease AD deployment. Upgrading to Windows Server 2003 AD is a simple in-place upgrade from Win2K, and
can be as simple under NT 4 if you've already worked to
clean up your NT 4 domain. If not, Windows Server 2003
includes the Active Directory Migration Tool (ADMT) 2.0
to ease the process. New cross-forest trust, domain
rename, and schema reversal features address other
common complaints.
From a management standpoint, AD includes numerous UI
improvements, including drag and drop capabilities,
multiple object selection and editing, saved queries,
and other refinements. A full suite of AD-based command
line tools are also available for command line junkies
and scripting purposes.
Technically, manageability is one of the many abilities that Microsoft likes to tout in Windows Server 2003. But management is so fundamental to the server that I've broken it out separately here. In Windows Server 2003, Microsoft has identified several "pillars" of manageability, including:
Windows Server 2003 now supports Remote Installation Services (RIS) for the rapid installation of a small number servers; this feature was previous available only on Windows desktop systems. New Manage Your Server and Configure Your Server wizards simplify the process of assigning server roles, a new concept for this release: You might configure a server to be a file server, print server, Web server, and so on, and can easily assign multiple roles where appropriate.
The new Manage Your Server
wizard assists in assigning
server roles, which is handy and easy to use.
Windows Server 2003 supports Software Update Services (SUS, formerly Windows Update Corporate) and AutoUpdate, to ensure that servers are kept up-to-date, and automatically. The new Software Restriction Policies (SRP) feature creates a virtual sandbox that prevents unauthorized code execution. SRP is policy-based.
This nifty dialog--also available in XP
SP1--lets you
auto-download critical bug fixes and then auto-install
them.
It's about time.
A new Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) provides a scriptable interface for managing group policies. The GPMC is an MMC snap-in built onto those interfaces and designed directly from customer feedback. Microsoft says that GPMC will not be included in the final RTM version of Windows Server 2003, but will ship soon thereafter as a separate, but free, Web download. One nice feature of this tool is its integration with Resultant Set of Policies (RSoP), which lets admins generate reports to view what policies have been applied to specific users and machines, and test policy changes before implementing them live.
"We wanted to give administrators more control," said Michael Dennis, the Lead Program Manager of the Windows Server Management Group. "There was just a lot of stuff we didn't think of originally. But customers were asking for more command line tools, headless server mode, task-based administration tools, command line access to WMI (Windows Management Infrastructure), and emergency server access, which lets you access the server when the keyboard and mouse won't work. We implemented all of this in Windows Server."
Windows Server 2003 includes various improvements to
the NTFS file system and storage subsystem. David Golds,
the Group Program Manager for the Core File System Team,
says that his favorite new feature is Volume Shadow
Copies. Essentially a network-based System Restore
feature, Volume Shadow Copies lets you access older
versions of files on the network after they've been
changed or deleted. "It's the largest single bet in Windows
Server 2003," Golds said. "We create a permanent or temporary
volume representing a snapshot of an existing volume at
a certain point in time, and then freeze that point in
time, and let you come back to it. It's not arbitrary."
The Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) required for this
feature represents the first time Microsoft has created
a backup framework, one that can be extended by third
parties.
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), command line disk defragging that now
supports any cluster size (Windows 2000 supported only
4K clusters), a dramatically enhanced Check Disk
(Microsoft reports over 1000 percent improvement), and
dramatic improvements in the scalability of the NTFS file system.
To improve Terminal Server (previously Terminal Services), Windows Server 2003 will ship with Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) 5.2, an upgrade to the RDP 5.1 version that shipped in Windows XP. Terminal Server, as before, supports two modes: A single user mode for administration purposes, and a multi-user mode for full Terminal Server functionality, where users are accessing a desktop or specific applications remotely. Windows Server 2003 also supports the Remote Assistance functionality from XP.
The new Remote Desktops tool makes it easy to manage
multiple
TS sessions.
New to this release are file redirection, high color support, resolutions up to 1600x1200, a cleaner user interface, enhanced management through WMI and Group Policies, better scalability, and a new Remote Desktop Client, which supports execution of remote desktops within a window, an IE browser, or the MMC. XP users working off of a Windows Server 2003-based Terminal Server will also get a handy auto-reconnect feature.
One of the most exciting advances in Windows Server 2003 is its integrated Windows Media Services (WMS) Series 9 server, code-named Corona Server. WMS 9 Series features a new Fast Streaming feature and dynamic content programming, and will work with prior Windows Media Player versions, but better with the upcoming Windows Media 9 Series Player. Note that WMS is included in the Standard, Enterprise, and Datacenter editions of Windows Server 2003, but not as part of Web Server Edition. Windows Server 2003 Enterprise and Datacenter Editions include unique WMS features such as cache/proxy server support and multicast content delivery.
Despite the fact that Microsoft's application server
is one of the most often-used parts of Windows Server,
it's an ill-defined and misunderstood component. John
Montgomery, the Group Product Manager of the Developer
Platform and Evangelism Group, says that application
server integration with Windows Server began in 1997,
when the company shipped the NT 4.0 Option Pack. At the
time, integrating an application server with the OS
seemed foolish to certain analysts, but now everyone is
doing it: Sun and HP both ship their app server products
in the box with their UNIX OSes.
So what is the Windows Server 2003 application server,
you might ask? Montgomery said that it's a role, not a
product. It provides the middle-tier application
services that historically have been handled by COM+,
Microsoft Message Queue (MSMQ) and IIS. However, in Windows
Server 2003, the application server has been expanded to
include the .NET Framework and its support for ASP .NET,
ADO .NET, and related technologies. Essentially, it's
that portion of the OS that lets Windows Server act as
the middle tier of a multi-tier application and services
infrastructure.
Windows Server 2003 ships with .NET Framework 1.1, SOAP
1.2, COM+ 1.5, and MSMQ 3.0 (which now supports SOAP
messages).
IIS 6.0 is the poster child for Windows Server
2003 security: The server ships with IIS disabled by default
for the first time, and when users do manually install
this feature, its several handicapped by default.
According to Andrew Cushman, the IIS Group Product
Manager, this situation will prevent enterprises from
exposing themselves to risk when installing Windows Server 2003.
"IIS 6 is locked down and more secure than previous
versions," Cushman said. "It's locked down by default,
and not installed by default. IIS 6 will serve only
static content by default when installed, and it runs
on a lower privilege account than before. We have more
secure default settings, include no sample code, have
more aggressive limits and timeouts, and stronger ACLs."
From a features standpoint, the coolest new feature is
IIS' new XML-based metabase, which can be edited live,
so when you make a change, it happens immediately
without requiring the server to be restarted. And
because it's XML, you can use any XML-based tool to make
the edits if you'd like. "It's text-based, so you can
open it in any text editor," Cushman said.
Performance in IIS 6 has also been improved
dramatically. According to Microsoft, IIS 6 offers roughly twice the performance of IIS 5 one the same two
processor hardware, and 2.5 times the performance on
four processors. New to this release is the concept of "Web
Gardens," collections of small, single-purpose Web
servers that scale by simply adding new machines.
Microsoft delivered Windows Server 2003 Release
Candidate 1 (RC1) in late July, and RC2
in December 2002. The company then completed the product development in late
March 2003 and
will launch the product April 24, 2003. But the completion of
Windows Server 2003 will only trigger a new round of
enterprise server products from Microsoft, all of which
will be "infused" with support for XML Web services. Goffe said that future versions of the Windows Server
family, the .NET Enterprise Servers, Windows desktop
versions, and even Microsoft Office will be largely
reworked around this concept.
The next Windows Server version will include support for Intel's 64-bit
Itanium family, of course, but it will also support 2-4
other 64-bit platforms, including AMD's Opteron, said
Brian Valentine. "We will only support high volume
64-bit platforms," he said, alluding to problems
Microsoft had supporting alternative architectures such
as the MIPs and PowerPC on NT 4. "We will support them
fully with key enterprise applications. There may be a
slight lag time after the x86-64 release [of these
applications], but we will support [the new platforms]."
Valentine wouldn't elaborate on which 64-bit platforms
Microsoft was currently evaluating.
Longhorn--the next Windows client release--will also
feature more managed code. "The goal is that everything
in the future will be managed code," Valentine said.
"[Longhorn] will have lots of managed code in key areas,
including the shell. But there is a lot of work to do
before we move to all-managed code. Office is a big code
base that is not managed, though [the Office team] is
moving there. The next Office version will have lots of
legacy code but more in each release will be managed."
Other upcoming server products include Exchange 2003
("Titanium", due in June 2003) and SQL Server "Yukon,"
which will ship in late 2003. Note that Exchange Server
2000 will not install on Windows Server 2003, so
customers will need to upgrade to Titanium if they wish
to use Exchange on Windows Server 2003. Yukon, however, is
arguably Microsoft's most important post-Windows Server 2003
release, since it will be used as the basis for future
file system, Active Directory, and Exchange Server
products. "SQL Server is the anchor of next to Windows Server 2003," Goffe told us. "It's the largest revenue
server, well over a $1 billion dollar business. In
Yukon, we'll add deep XML and SOAP integration, .NET CLR
integration, and include the Visual Studio development
environment so database programmers don't have to learn
two environments." Yukon will also feature enhanced self
management and self tuning features.
Regarding the
cost of Windows Server 2003, Brian Valentine told us
last summer to expect pricing to be in line with the price of the various Windows 2000
Server family members, and indeed, the company ultimately decided to keep the
price identical to that of Windows 2000. "Given the environment of late,
and the fact that people perceive us as being bad
people, we're not going to add fuel to the fire," he
said. "You can assume that the pricing will be about the
same as Windows 2000. There are still a lot of NT 4
boxes out there, and we want to get them all to Windows
Server 2003. We want all Windows 2000 users to upgrade. And
Sun's customers too. We're going to ask why they're on
that expensive architecture."
Windows Server 2003 is a surprisingly full-featured release, but
because it builds on the strong base of Windows 2000
Server, it will be a simple in-place upgrade for those
customers. Thanks to its new upgrade features, it should
also prove to be a simpler upgrade for the large crowd
of NT 4.0 Server holdouts, though we'll have to test
that functionality before passing final judgment.
My recommendation for this release is based largely on
your requirements. Existing Windows 2000 Server
customers should skip Windows Server 2003 unless it provides
some important specific functionality that is
unavailable in the prior release (for example, merging
companies can take advantage of the cross-forest trust
and domain renaming features in order to avoid costly
and time-consuming domain rebuilding). NT 4.0 Server
users should carefully evaluate this release and
strongly consider upgrading to Windows Server 2003.
In part two of my review, I take a look at Windows Server in the real world.