* Would you test Longhorn beta on your production environment?
The recent Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) produced lots of announcements, some of which should be of definite interest to you the Windows network manager. Most intriguing to me though was a plan by Microsoft to offer special licenses to users who want to run the Beta 2 version of the Longhorn Server operating system in specific roles within their networks.
These so-called “Go Live” licenses would allow you to install the beta software on production servers (something usually forbidden by the beta license). While it’s usually only the foolhardy and those looking for an extra bit of excitement in their lives who would even contemplate installing beta software in a production environment, this release holds the promise of extra support for those willing to give the new server operating system a full workout in specific scenarios.
While details of the Go Live license weren’t announced, the license for the upcoming WinFX Runtime (part of the Vista release) has been released and the license for Longhorn should be similar. What Microsoft is looking to discover is how Longhorn will work in some of the 17 different roles that can be assigned to the server, with the new feature called Server Manager that lets administrators configure servers with only the components they need for specific tasks, such as file servicing, Web serving, DNS or DHCP. We don’t know yet which of these roles will be released first, and which will be part of the Go Live license, but details should be forthcoming before the end of the summer.
Another announcement at WinHEC was for something you can use right now: an add-on to Windows Server 2003 called the Scalable Networking Pack (SNP). The Scalable Networking Initiative covers two initial areas: the Microsoft Chimney Offload architecture, which enables hardware vendors to offload to hardware the work associated with TCP/IP data movement; and Receive Side Scaling (RSS), a technology developed to make the networking stack scale better on multi-processor systems. You can download the software for free but you may need to upgrade your networking hardware in order to take advantage of it.
The Microsoft Windows Server 2003 SNP enables TCP Offload Engines (TOE) hardware to be deployed while maintaining application and network management compatibility. This will be useful both to customers receiving new servers with TOE NICs (an unfortunate acronym, in my opinion), and to customers who have older servers and are interested in extending the lives of the servers by adding a TOE NIC and the new Microsoft software. Broadcom, IBM and Dell have announced plans to ship TOE NICs.
TCP Chimney offload is an operating system interface to a new class of advanced Ethernet network adapters that can completely manage TCP data transfer, including acknowledgement processing and TCP segmentation and reassembly. While most servers will benefit from TCP Chimney and TOE technology, servers with network backup and data replication workloads, file serving or remote file access (SMB/NFS) workloads, and iSCSI (for storage consolidation on IP storage-area networks) workloads, will especially benefit.
RSS enables the receive processing of networking traffic to be load balanced across multiple CPUs by leveraging new hardware in the NIC. It will dynamically balance the load as either system load, or network traffic patterns vary. Any application that has significant networking traffic and runs on a multiprocessor host will benefit from RSS.
Head over to Microsoft’s Scalable Networking site for all the details and see if this can improve your servers’ performance.
