Is it worth the wait?
Microsoft trained usto expect annual releases of new versions of Windows NT: NT 3.1 shipped in 1993, NT 3.5 in 1994, NT 3.51 in 1995, and NT 4.0 in 1996. Four years later, the company will finally release the latest version, under a new name: Windows 2000—Win2K. (For information about the name change, see Mark Smith, "Is NT Windows?" December 1998.)
The OS's name isn't the only thing that's new; Win2K is full of changes. What you've read so far about the new NT only scratches the surface. The difference between Win2K and NT 4.0 is vastly greater than the difference between NT 4.0 and NT 3.51. The three main changes are increased reliability and scalability, improved supportability, and updated hardware support. (For a list of Win2K acronyms and terms, see the sidebar "Windows 2000 Glossary," page 60.)
Enterprise Reliability and Scalability
Win2K must be more reliable and more scalable than NT 4.0 is. The OS can no longer require weekly server reboots to keep a system running, and it must support computers with 8, 16, and even 32 processors. Win2K needs to be reliable and scalable enough that we wouldn't laugh at the idea of AT&T using the OS to run its long-distance network.
Win2K's crown jewel: Active Directory (AD). To make Win2K more enterprise-ready than NT 4.0 is, Microsoft made AD a part of the OS. (For information about migrating your NT domain models to Win2K's AD, see Sakari Kouti, "Migrating to Active Directory," January 1999.)
AD is a directory service (i.e., a hierarchical database of users, computers, and shared applications and data) that a Microsoft Jet database engine controls. Although Win2K's AD isn't as powerful as Novell Directory Services (NDS) or Banyan's StreetTalk directory services, most of Win2K's compelling new features require—or take advantage of—AD to work.
With AD, Win2K supports networks that have far more users and machines than NT 4.0 supports. An AD database can accommodate between 1.5 and 20 million user accounts. AD is easy to extend, letting you build groups of domains, called forests, that automatically trust one another. Within a domain, you can divide security authority among organizational units (OUs) and eliminate the need for NT 4.0's resource domains. AD in Win2K understands network topologies. Thus, you can tell the service which machines have slow WAN links, and AD will compress domain controller communications before sending information over those links to conserve bandwidth. This feature is important because domain controller communication will increase now that AD's domain controllers use multimaster replication, which lets administrators connect to any domain controller to reset passwords, create new accounts, or perform other domain account maintenance. (In contrast, NT 4.0 administrators can perform account administration only when they're connected in realtime to a domain's PDC.) A significant weakness of AD in Win2K is the inability to merge (i.e., to prune and graft) two existing AD structures. However, Microsoft plans to incorporate software to address this limitation.
A scalable OS. To be viable in the enterprise, an OS must be scalable. And Microsoft clearly thinks Win2K is scalable because Win2K Datacenter Server (Datacenter) supports 32 processors right out of the box. The OS also supports as much as 64GB of RAM—assuming you can find a server and applications to support that much memory.
But if you want big, you need to wait for the 64-bit version of NT—the version that will run on Intel's Itanium (formerly code-named Merced). According to Microsoft, Win2K is the last 32-bit version of NT. (But the company has also called every version of Windows since 3.1 the "very last" version of Windows.)
Supportability
Running networks of PCs is expensive, both on the front end (desktop PCs) and on the back end (servers and network infrastructure). By simplifying remote server administration, providing automated scripting tools, improving the network infrastructure, and incorporating new desktop support tools, Microsoft made Win2K easier and cheaper to support than previous versions of NT are.
Remote control. Remote servers are especially easy to support. Every Win2K server has a built-in Telnet server that supports as many as two simultaneous connections. When you Telnet to a Win2K server, you receive a prompt for a username and password. After you supply these variables, you get a typical C:\> prompt. Although you can't run GUI tools from Telnet, Win2K's command line is considerably more powerful than NT 4.0's. Many tools have command-line equivalents, and according to Microsoft, you can easily replace GUI-only tools by entering a few lines of VBScript. A caveat is that VBScript is easy to write, but finding documentation for the hooks into the OS is difficult.
Even administrative tools that don't run from the command line work as well on remote computers as on the local machine because virtually all hardware functions are now built around the Windows Management Interface. WMI is an eminently remoteable software interface. An example of WMI's power is the Device Manager, a program that lets you view and modify hardware settings not only for the computer you're sitting at but also for any network machine that you can see and that you have administrative rights on. Storage management is similarly improved: Whereas NT 4.0's Disk Administrator lets you format and partition disks only on locally attached disks, Win2K's Disk Management lets you perform these actions locally or over the network.
Remote control gets yet another boost in the form of Windows Terminal Services. Terminal Server debuted in a separate version of NT 4.0, but now just one click converts any Win2K server into a Terminal Server system. Suppose you need to reset a password or view an event log at 3:00 a.m. to solve a problem, but you live 40 miles from work. You can simply connect to the company's intranet over the Internet via a VPN and open a Terminal Server session.
Network infrastructure. To build an NT-based network around TCP/IP, you need three important infrastructure tools: DHCP, which hands out IP addresses to client machines; WINS, which helps those machines find domain controllers and each other; and DNS, which helps find particular machines' IP addresses and Internet domains' mail servers. Although Microsoft simply polished WINS in Win2K, it significantly improved DHCP and DNS. (For information about WINS, see Alistair G. Lowe-Norris, "Tombstones Mark the Coming of the End for WINS," March 1999.)
DHCP servers provide machines with unique IP addresses, an essential part of making a machine work on an intranet. DHCP has worked well since NT 3.5, but the protocol has always had one problem: Setting up a DHCP server is too easy. Occasionally, a novice administrator practices with the protocol by setting up a DHCP server on a PC. Then, the administrator's new DHCP server starts handing out bogus IP addresses to unsuspecting workstations. The worthless addresses in turn prevent the workstations from functioning on the company's network.
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