Longhorn Beta 2 is an impressive package

Enterprise IT folks aren't exactly champing at the bit to get Vista into their shops; many are only now distributing Windows XP Service Pack 2, and there are plenty of copies of Windows 2000 Professional still around. But Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2003 R2 didn’t need to sell their way into most Windows Enterprise server rooms: They were anticipated and welcomed because they rounded out Windows Servers’ growing strengths in distributed applications, Terminal Services, directory services, centralized administration, collaboration, failure recovery, and networked storage.

In much the same vein, Windows Longhorn Server should be an easy sell in Windows shops. For one thing, it shares none of much-delayed Vista’s very public search for identity. Now in its second beta release, Longhorn Server rolls in the innumerable new features one expects in a major release. But Longhorn Server’s overall emphasis on consolidating and simplifying deployment and administration and on making key features accessible to developers and admins at scales greater and smaller than those offered by Windows 2003 Server, stand out as impressive.

Smaller and Farther Away

I tested the 32- and 64-bit editions of Longhorn Server Beta 2 in a setting incorporating several machines, the primary systems being a quad-core Opteron server and AMD’s newest dual-core Athlon 64 FX-62. The FX-62 system supplied storage services to the test LAN using an Xserve RAID storage array with PCI-Express Fibre Channel card, both provided by Apple.

One enhancement that grabbed me early on was the Longhorn Server Core edition. Longhorn Server Core strips Longhorn down to its skivvies so that much smaller, simpler servers providing file/print, DNS, DHCP, and other essential services can be distributed throughout the network. However, the deployment and administrative overhead of bringing up a new Windows Server system -- although greatly eased by Longhorn -- is still significant.

In operation, I found Server Core to be Microsoft’s answer to the trend of using Linux for the important headless, set-it-and-forget-it servers that IT spreads around large networks and places in branch offices. Longhorn Server Core’s advantage over Linux is its integration with Longhorn’s centralized management scheme, and given Longhorn’s improvements in that area, it’s a major plus.

Along the same lines, Microsoft also equipped Longhorn with a downsized Active Directory set aside for applications’ use only. Perhaps now we can escape the dreaded Registry and (shudder) .INI files, neither of which distributes particularly well.

Here’s one improvement that gets me all charged up: Terminal Services now has the capability to run a remotely hosted application in a window that makes it indistinguishable from an ordinary local app. Instead of having two desktops on each machine -- one local and one hosted by Terminal Services -- or resorting to thin clients for simpler, cheaper remote application access, Microsoft took a page from Softricity’s per-application virtualization approach. IT will find, as I did, that being able to run an application at a client system without first installing it brings user-facing Windows software into the distributed age.