Some New Features of Windows 2003:

Active Directory Flexibility. The biggest problem with Active Directory in Windows 2000 is its lack of flexibility. Sure, a lot of customers took to heart Microsoft's warnings that extensive planning was necessary because you only got one shot at your Active Directory infrastructure. Then those same companies, having done all that planning and careful implementation, learned they were about to merge or acquire another company. OK, now what? Microsoft has done a much better job with this second version of the Active Directory to give the enterprise the flexibility to change the directory structure for business, technical, political and optimization reasons. If (and this is a big if) all the Domain Controllers are updated to Windows Server 2003, customers can rename domains, redefine schema and enable cross-forest trusts.

New Windows servers are secure by default. One of the most important changes in Windows Server 2003 is Microsoft's change of heart about default installations. The old Microsoft turned most everything on by default, hoping customers would use some of the new features and get further hooked on Windows or integrations with other Microsoft desktop and server products. The new security-conscious Microsoft is turning almost everything off by default. This means that when new servers are going into the infrastructure, it's almost always a good idea to go with Windows Server 2003 to sidestep the possibility of sloppy security on new installations.

Internet Information Services security. A lot of IIS administrators feel highly exposed with the Microsoft Web server. IIS 6.0, along with the entire operating system, got a line-by-line code scrub for vulnerable code. In real terms, that extensive security review should result in fewer buffer overruns and other vulnerabilities that result in security patches that somehow end up not being deployed and do end up getting exploited in sprawling enterprises.

New Web servers. On the topic of Web servers, Microsoft has opened a real opportunity for enterprises to save money with its new Windows Server 2003, Web Edition. A response to the free Linux/Apache model, the Web Edition costs $400 compared with the $1,000 cost of Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition. For an enterprise that needs to add Web server capacity AND has an application dependency on Microsoft technologies, the Web Edition is the logical choice. Downsides to consider are the two CPU and 2 GB of RAM limitations, but neither is a problem for most Web servers.

The Useful Scenarios

Domain Controller enhancements and Active Directory management. While the base operating system is very similar architecturally from Windows 2000 to Windows Server 2003, Active Directory has gone through many changes. Upgrading Domain Controllers and the Active Directory to Windows Server 2003 brings the ability to deploy AD replicas from backup media, Resultant Set of Policy features and a host of other nice improvements. All the new stuff in Active Directory will make life easier for administrators, if it works. Active Directory is a massive, complex beast with so many real-world variations that it is impossible for Microsoft to comprehensively model it in its labs. While users can deploy the 2003 version of the OS with the confidence that little is changed from Windows 2000, the same is not true of Active Directory. Customers thinking about an upgrade should know exactly what features they want from the new Active Directory and should make sure those expected benefits exceed the risks.

High-end workloads. Windows 2000 was an order of magnitude more scalable than Windows NT 4.0. Windows Server 2003 makes another huge jump forward, with Microsoft competing in performance on top benchmarks with Unix/RISC systems, while continuing to undercut those same competitors aggressively on price. Some of the high-end performance enhancements in the Windows Server 2003 family are new 64-bit editions and higher limits on CPUs (64) and RAM (512 GB). Probably the most important thing for most real-world, high-end workloads is the expanded scalability of the Enterprise Edition, the successor to Windows 2000 Advanced Server. The Enterprise Edition will come in a 64-bit edition and support up to 32 GB of RAM in the 32-bit version and up to 64 GB of RAM in the 64-bit version. Also new to the Windows Server 2003 family on the scalability front - NUMA support, which makes the servers responsive to IBM's brick-based servers; support for Intel's HyperThreading technology, which makes one physical processor behave as two logical processors for a performance boost of up to 30 percent; and multi-path I/O.

High availability. Companies with high-availability requirements get a lot of new options with Windows Server 2003. Both the Enterprise Edition and the Datacenter Edition will support eight-node failover clustering, up from two-node in Windows 2000 Advanced Server and four-node in Datacenter Server. Additionally, Microsoft is allowing for geographic separation of nodes in its clusters, making them much more useful out of the box for disaster recovery and business continuity planning. Microsoft also worked with fault-tolerant server vendor, Stratus, to make memory mirroring respond much faster. At a broader level, the new Volume Shadow Copy service should help organizations of all sizes and availability requirements overcome system stumbles.

Making IIS-based Web applications more available. Customers who need to make their Web applications more available will find more in IIS 6.0 than the substantial security enhancements. Through a new feature called an application pool, IIS isolates individual Web applications or multiple sites into a self-contained process that communicates directly with the operating system kernel. The feature reduces hardware requirements, but also prevents one application or site from disrupting others in another application pool.

Server consolidation. The scalability and availability enhancements outlined above make Windows Server 2003 a strong platform for consolidating underutilized servers throughout the enterprise and hosting the formerly dispersed applications on a massive Windows-based server. Microsoft is sweetening the pot with some additional management features. One is the Windows Resource Manager tool for allowing administrators to assign limits on resources such as CPUs and memory for individual applications on a large server and to manage the settings through Group Policy.