Microsoft launched its long-delayed Windows Server 2003
operating system this week, but some users could not
wait.
Nasdaq Stock Market and JetBlue Airways jumped from Windows 2000
Server to the Windows 2003 beta to gain a performance edge and
pursue server consolidation.
Meanwhile, the Kentucky Department of Education and Intrawest
took the plunge in the hope that Active Directory would help rein
in the many domain controllers they had with Windows NT 4.0.
Windows Server 2003 promises improvements in performance,
scalability, reliability, security, manageability, networking and
its integrated .net development framework.
But migrating to a new server operating system is no snap for
any IT department, once the planning, testing and potential
disruption to end-users are built into the equation.
All four of these early adopters said they realised benefits
from migrating to Windows Server 2003, but they also expended
months of effort to make sure they did.
Plus, as participants in Microsoft's joint development or rapid
adoption programmes, they received special assistance to ensure
that their projects went smoothly.
Careful assessment and planning will be crucial for any company
migrating to Windows Server 2003, in order to realise the full
business benefits and justify the expense in a tough economy,
analysts and consultants say.
IT managers need to step back and envision the future, advised
Chris Burry, a technology infrastructure practice director at
consultancy Avanade. He said IT departments should weigh questions
such as what role directory services will play in their business
and how those services can enable provisioning, security and
management.
"If you look at what you need the infrastructure to do, that's
the best way to organise your migration," Burry said.
Directory drives migration
For organisations using NT 4, such as the Kentucky Department of
Education, Active Directory is often the first step of the
migration.
The education department had over 300 Windows NT 4.0 domains and
more than 2,000 domain controllers dotting the state's 176 school
districts and 1,400 schools, and the distributed systems had become
tough to manage and patch, particularly from a security
standpoint.
Chuck Austin, project manager of the Kentucky Education
Technology System, said both IT staffers and school superintendents
saw the benefits of using Active Directory to manage critical
network resources centrally and deliver services.
Their goal is to improve security, reduce recurring costs and
complexity, stabilise backbone services and lay a foundation for
better collaboration.
To preserve local autonomy, the IT department will delegate
authority for managing users, computers and groups to network
administrators in the districts. Each district will have at least
one Windows Server 2003 domain controller and a global catalogue
server, and about 20 districts are expected to continue to run
Novell's NetWare in tandem.
Tim Cornett, the Kentucky Department of Education's Active
Directory lead architect, said the directory migration to Windows
Server 2003 has been easier than it would have been with Windows
2000 Server because he does not have to manually create connection
objects for replication between domain controllers.
Another overall benefit from the Active Directory migration,
which is due for completion by year's end, will be the reduction of
the 2,000-plus domain controllers to 400 and the 300-plus domains
to 178, Austin said.
When the Kentucky Department of Education migrates its 320
Exchange and 700 web servers, it hopes to achieve server
consolidation, he added.
Domain servers reduced
Intrawest has about 130 Windows NT 4 servers involved in domain
and security tasks. But the IT department is aiming to reduce the
"god-awful mess" to 40 dual-processor Dell PowerEdge 2650s running
Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition, said Matthew Dunn, chief
information officer at the resort operator and developer.
He said the company's 35 active domains will be cut to two,
thanks to six months of careful consideration and planning.
One challenge that Intrawest encountered in figuring out the
best way to address the problem was wading through the boat-load of
documents that Microsoft makes available to customers. "Microsoft
is almost guilty of supplying too much information," Dunn said.
Plans call for Intrawest's Microsoft and in-house applications
to be migrated from Windows NT and 2000 to Windows Server 2003 over
the next two years. Dunn said he wants a .net-centric architecture
to pave the way for the web services he hopes will help disparate
systems talk to one another through XML and Simple Object Access
Protocol (Soap).
"Because of the performance gains," he added, "there's an
opportunity to pursue consolidation as well as migration."
Shrinking the web server farm
Steve Randich, chief information officer at Nasdaq in New York,
said Nasdaq.com saw a 25%-30% boost in performance running Windows
Server 2003. That enabled his staff to consolidate 75
four-processor Dell web servers to 35 servers.
Stress-testing tools from Mercury Interactive showed that the
servers can handle more sessions and users. "We pay less
maintenance when we have fewer boxes in production," Randich said,
adding that he also expects to reduce licences.
Application code has run more reliably, and servers required
fewer patches than Windows 2000 Server did during its beta period,
said JP Athey, vice-president of Nasdaq network and web technology.
Migrating web servers still involves the typical intensive testing
effort, but he found it "more seamless" than the move to Windows
2000 Server.
Server consolidation, performance, enhanced security and total
cost of ownership benefits will be the key drivers when Nasdaq
looks to migrate other web, database, transaction processing and
application servers from Windows 2000, Athey added.
Nasdaq, which is doing a server consolidation study with
Hewlett-Packard, hopes to go from 1,100 servers to 700.
Rick Fricchione, vice-president of Microsoft services at HP,
said IT departments often start with migration and move to
consolidation to cost-justify the upgrade. But he warned that they
need to focus on service management, availability and reliability
once there are tens of servers each supporting 1,000 users, rather
than hundreds of servers handling 100 users each.
"The biggest gotcha we've seen is understanding that you're much
more mission-critical when you come out the other end," he said.
"Instead of having 100 people impacted when a machine goes down,
you may have 1,000 impacted. So operational best practices matter
greatly."
Boosting scalability
Improvements to Windows' Distributed File System (DFS) were a
major impetus for JetBlue Airways to upgrade to Windows Server
2003. The airline relies on DFS services to distribute electronic
manuals to pilots as part of its paperless cockpit initiative.
JetBlue chief information officer Jeff Cohen said DFS
replication in Windows 2000 Server sometimes did not work as
advertised in updating changes made in the root folders. But the
new version of DFS fixes the problem and affords more granular
control over replication.
An all-Microsoft shop, JetBlue sometimes runs 40% of its systems
on beta software. But, Cohen said, there is minimal risk because
Microsoft "is standing by your side." By 19 May, JetBlue will have
devoted more than 5,000 man-hours to testing, planning and
developing applications for Windows Server 2003.
Its migration of 250 Windows 2000 servers started with the
"extremely smooth" upgrade of 22 domain controllers, he said. One
of the few minor issues was that HP's SmartStart setup utility was
not ready to help configure the servers.
JetBlue is also shifting mission-critical applications to
Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition on Unisys ES7000 boxes,
including two running 64-bit Windows Datacenter on Itanium 2
processors. The company has three ES7000s in production and four
more in the works.
Next month, JetBlue will go live with the new 64-bit SQL Server
2000 for its frequent-flyer programme, a move Cohen likens to
doubling the size of a highway during rush-hour traffic. The
company also plans to run its entire web server front-end on
ES7000s. "These servers can give five 9s of reliability," Cohen
said. "We're running an airline. We cannot afford to be down."
But Avanade's Burry warned that Datacenter may not be the right
choice for every IT user considering Windows Server 2003. Each
company will need to carefully weigh the economic impact of
downtime, he said.
"As you drive up the availability, you also drive up the cost,"
Burry said. "There are places where Datacenter Server is absolutely
marvellous. But it needs to be connected to the requirements of
your business."
Should you upgrade?
Windows Server 2003 has been described as not much more than an
incremental upgrade to Windows 2000 Server. But some users and
analysts say a few key features set it apart, such as the
following:
Active Directory improvements, including cross-forest trust,
domain rename and schema redefine capabilities, more efficient
replication and synchronisation, a new group policy management
console and new group policy settings, and the ability to load
directory content from back-up media such as CDs, DVDs and file
copies without replicating across the corporate network.
- Enhanced security, including the lockdown by default of
Internet Information Server 6.0 and a new Internet Connection
Firewall to protect and monitor traffic between the network and the
internet.
- Internet Information Server 6.0, which is based on a new
request-processing architecture. It provides an application
isolation environment to prevent one application or site from
stopping another and to reduce the time needed to restart
services.
- Volume Shadow Copy Service, which enables rapid "snapshot"
back-ups of servers without disrupting applications.
- Built-in .net Framework support, along with native support for
Web services standards such as XML, Soap, Web Services Description
Language and UDDI.
- Support for 64-bit computing in Enterprise and Datacenter
editions.
- Windows System Resource Manager, which lets IT managers
allocate CPU and memory on a per-application basis.
- More scalable, efficient Distributed File System allows
multiple DFS routes to be hosted on each server; during system
failure, a server fails to the nearest available server.