This overview of key features will compel you to migrate
You might still be wrestling with your Windows 2000 deployment. You don't have the time or inclination to consider a migration to Windows .NET Server (Win.NET Server). But you might want to take a moment to see what Win.NET Server has to offer: Although Win.NET Server isn't a momentous release, as Win2K was, it offers some serious new features and significant improvements that smooth out some of Win2K's rough edges. The complete list of Win.NET Server's new and improved features is long, but the product's key infrastructure improvements—such as Active Directory (AD) modifications—can present compelling business reasons to consider the new platform.
What's New
Let's start with the features that are new to Win.NET Server. Few of Win.NET Server's new features are radical departures from the Win2K feature set; rather, they're logical extensions of existing functionality.
64-bit Windows. Windows .NET Enterprise Server, Windows XP Professional Edition, and Win2K Datacenter Server are the first Microsoft OSs to fully support 64-bit computing. The new 64-bit architecture shines most brightly in its ability to support and speed up large, memory-intensive applications. Whereas 32-bit Windows can address as much as 3GB of user address space in virtual memory, 64-bit Windows can address as much as 16TB—a 5000 percent improvement. Therefore, the system can run much larger data sets in physical memory (and avoid paging to the much slower disk subsystem) than 32-bit Windows can.
Domain Rename. In Win.NET Server, Microsoft has redressed the near impossibility in Win2K of renaming AD domains. (Even so, renaming AD domains is a dangerous prospect and isn't something you should consider lightly.) Microsoft has prepared a 28-page document about the Domain Rename tool at http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/downloads/tools/domainrename/default.asp. The article walks you through the process of renaming a Win.NET Server domain. If you need to rename domains in your environment, this new functionality offers a powerful incentive to upgrade to Win.NET Server.
Install Replica from Media. A common complaint among administrators of companies with branch offices is that installing a domain controller (DC) at a small office that has a slow network connection is difficult. In Win2K, when you promote a server to a DC, the new DC copies the AD database from another DC in the site. If no other DCs reside in the same site—a common occurrence in branch offices—the data must be replicated from a DC across a WAN circuit that likely has limited bandwidth. This replication can deal a severe blow to the network performance of Microsoft client machines.
Win.NET Server's Dcpromo utility lets you load the AD database into the new DC from a system-state backup, as Figure 1 shows. You can burn a zipped system-state backup to CD-ROM—a 2GB system-state backup compresses down to as little as 400MB—and express-mail it to the branch office that's installing the new DC. The branch office unzips the backup to a temporary location, uses Ntbackup to restore it to an alternative location, and uses the Dcpromo /adv command to import the AD data into the new DC. AD then replicates the data from another DC to incorporate any changes that have occurred since the creation of the system-state backup.
Functional levels. Functional levels are descendants of Win2K's native mode. In Win2K, native mode is a versioning mechanism that enables full AD functionality across the domain—as long as you don't have any downlevel (e.g., Windows NT 4.0) DCs in the domain. Functional levels take this concept beyond the domain to the forest.
Win.NET Server offers two functional levels: domain functional level and forest functional level. Domain functional level is the Win.NET Server equivalent of Win2K's native mode. When you raise the domain functional level from Win2K to Win.NET Server, you can't have any downlevel (i.e., Win2K or earlier) DCs in the domain. The primary benefit of elevating your domains to Win.NET Server domain functional level is that doing so prepares your forest for an eventual elevation to forest functional level.
After you raise the domain functional level on every domain in your forest to Win.NET Server native mode, you can raise the forest functional level to Win.NET Server. When you achieve this functional level for the forest, you can't promote any of the forests' non-Win.NET Server machines to DCs.
Advancing AD to forest functional level makes improvements to many forestwide operations (e.g., AD synchronization improvements), which I describe later. To change functional levels, go to the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) Active Directory Domains and Trusts snap-in, right-click Active Directory Domains and Trusts above the domain container, and click Raise Forest Functionality to access the dialog box that Figure 2 shows.