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November 2, 1998

NT5: Miles TO Go Before Win2000

Beta 2 of Microsoft's newly renamed operating system shows how feature-rich the final product will be-and how much work is still to be done

By Jim Drews, Mike Lee, Steve Gillmor, and Logan Harbaugh

Related stories:

This article is part of a joint research and reporting project on Windows 2000 by the editors of CMP Media's InformationWeek, Network Computing, Computer Reseller News, and Windows magazine.

For more on Win2000, see:

High Hopes For The New NT

Unix, NT Mix It Up

Behind The Numbers: Expectations For Win2000

icrosoft obviously has a lot riding on the next release of its Windows NT operating system. Windows 2000 Server--formerly Windows NT Server 5.0--is the delivery vehicle for the next phase of Microsoft's enterprise strategy. It includes major revisions to the company's distributed computing architecture, transaction technology, and other technologies that Microsoft hopes will expand the company's high-end credibility.

But will Windows 2000 Server deliver on all the advance hype? Or has Microsoft bitten off more than can be handled in a single release of the operating system? Network Computing's Real World Labs and InformationWeek Labs conducted an intensive evaluation of the latest public beta, Windows NT 5.0 Beta 2, to see how far Microsoft has come on living up to its promises--and how far it has to go.

There are some improvements in the operating system's management and administration features, as well as significant gains in the Internet and intranet functionality. But it's questionable whether Microsoft will be able to deliver all the new features promised in the initial release.

Beta 2 is chock-full of features and, all in all, we liked what it had to offer--including Active Directory, enhanced security and management features, and more. Nevertheless, we recommend treading very lightly when it comes to early deployment of Windows 2000 as a server operating system. Though some features appear to be rock-solid, others need work, and we doubt Microsoft will have all the kinks worked out by the time Windows 2000 Server ships sometime in 1999. We suspect there will be feature extensions and service packs soon after the product ships. If possible, wait through a couple of service packs and possibly even a minor revision--but not longer than that.

Once Windows 2000 gets on its feet, we predict it will become a formidable system for midtier enterprise application deployment. We found that the operating system itself is now quite stable. We also liked the management console and its snap-ins, though we hope Microsoft brings the memory footprint down in the final release.

As we learned in an earlier test of Beta 1, Active Directory and many of the tools and utilities around it are seriously flawed. The Beta 2 version exhibits dependencies on Windows Internet Name Service that lead us to question whether Active Directory is suitable for enterprise deployment--although Microsoft assures us it is removing all WINS dependencies. Also, Active Directory's reliance on dynamic Domain Name System (DNS) was often problematic in terms of the stability of the directory system.

We tested Beta 2's migration features extensively. Here, too, we found that Microsoft has much work to do. For example, although we successfully set up trees in San Mateo, Calif., and Madison, Wis., over our WAN, creating a two-tree "forest," it involved significantly more effort than we thought it should have. We question Microsoft's decision to maintain compatibility with NT 4, as this essentially perpetuates its domain structure

Nuts And Bolts
NT 4 is notorious for needing to be rebooted whenever system changes are called for--for example, to add or remove a protocol such as IPX, or change certain TCP/IP settings. Beta 2 has vastly reduced the need to shut down the system for changes. In fact, we were able to add protocols and change the frame type for IPX without rebooting once.

However, we were forced to restart the system a number of times to get some things to work, such as file replication in Distributed File System. Microsoft's goal is to pare the number of reboot scenarios to no more than five by the time Windows 2000 ships. Overall, we applaud Microsoft's efforts here.

When we got Beta 2 running, we noticed it was a resource hog, swallowing up just about all the resources (RAM and disk space) we could throw at it. A fresh installation took about 700 Mbytes of disk space (including 250 Mbytes for the swap file). It was easy to push memory consumption on our test servers to well beyond the 130-Mbyte mark--and we hadn't even opened any end-user applications yet.

Granted, many parts of the operating system have not been optimized and no doubt there's a sizable chunk of debug code in the operating system, but we fear that the beta versions have raised the bar on minimum memory requirements for running Windows 2000. Take it from us: Windows 2000 will probably mean buying more minimum RAM than you needed with NT 4, and will likely chew up more disk space, too. For example, we found that NT 5 Workstation (now Windows 2000 Professional) took up about 400 Mbytes of disk space and 32 Mbytes of RAM on a fairly idle machine.

Active Directory
Giving a nod to its beta status, we didn't compare the performance or features of Windows' Active Directory to Novell Directory Services. Nevertheless, some general comparisons are in order. In its implementation of Active Directory, Microsoft introduces the concept of the forest, which is a collection of Active Directory trees. Though seemingly more powerful than Novell's single-tree construct, it's really much the same thing. An NDS tree with multiple Organization root objects is pretty much akin to a forest with many trees.