Microsoft Server for NFS, which enables file sharing to UNIX clients, and Microsoft Client for NFS, which lets Windows access files on other NFS servers, have also undergone a comprehensive update in R2. These components now deliver a more reliable and usable solution, partly because of their brandnew administrative UI. Additionally, all the UNIX components now have 64-bit support.
Another part of the UNIX "bundle" is Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA). SUA effectively allows UNIX applications to be recompiled under Windows environments, so that the UNIX applications can use both UNIX and regular Win32 APIs.
Another new R2 feature, Hardware Management, includes Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) support via a driver and provider that let Windows interact with IPMI instrumentation on the motherboard to gather information (e.g., CPU temperature). This interaction with the motherboard lets the System event log's contents be replicated and displayed in the Windows event log, so that the monitoring and alerting infrastructure that the OS uses for Windows events can also be used for hardware-level events. This information is also made available through standard Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), so that any WMI-enabled tool can read and set these hardware-related values.
R2 also provides a Web Services for Management (WS-Management) implementation, which enables WMI management via HTTP and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). WS-Management also lets an administrator manage servers when an OS isn't running; for example, it allows BIOSlevel access of a machine or in a post-crash situation. R2 must be installed only on the server that's performing the WSManagementå nitiated conversation. This capability is useful for distributed environments because it lets an administrator remotely investigate and fix remote servers.
Also included in R2 is Simple SAN, a component that's meant to make implementing a SAN much easier for small-to-midsized businesses (SMBs). Simple SAN is designed to help an administrator configure and manage a basic SAN environment via a single UI—Storage Manager for SANs—which uses Microsoft Virtual Disk Service (VDS) to autodiscover disk arrays and servers on the SAN. iSCSI and Microsoft Multipath I/O (MPIO) support is included in VDS 1.1, which is part of R2. The snap-in that's provided in Storage Manager for SANs facilitates creating and assigning LUNs and managing connections between LUNs and servers.
Several of the most impressive new R2 features are related to storage management. First, Quota Management lets you control sizes of folders and volumes according to total actual disk usage instead of breaking them down by user-or group-specific quotas. You simply set a total size the folder can grow to, based on the physical space used on the disk, which allows more compressed data to be saved. For example, you could have a quota of 500MB and save 700MB of compressed, logical data. Contrast the new R2 quotas with the per-user and per-volumeè?ªased quotas used in Windows 2000 and later that were based on the logical, not physical, space used.
You can configure actions to take when a quota is reached, such as sending an email message to administrators, the user whose data exceeded the quota, or a predefined group; writing an informational message to an event log; executing a command or script; running a storage report (more about this shortly); or any combination of these actions. Quotas can be hard or soft limits. A hard limit stops new data from being created; a soft quota allows more data to be written and is typically used as a trigger to send notification about reaching the quota. R2 includes templates for common quota scenarios that you can use, copy, or modify. Be aware that quota management is real-time; therefore, an in-process I/O request can fail when the quota is breached.
R2 provides a comprehensive storage-reporting component that lets you generate reports as needed and schedule reports according to particular volumes, folders, or shares. You can also configure reports to be emailed in any of a number of formats, including Dynamic HTML (DHTML), which allows dynamic sorting and even graphing capabilities; regular HTML; XML; comma-separated value (CSV), and text.
R2 also provides a useful file-screening component, a real-time feature that monitors folders or volumes that you've specified and screens for certain types of files (e.g., audio, video, .exe). The file-screening component supplies many standard file-group types as templates, called storage management policies. You can modify these policies or define new file groups as needed. Similar to hard and soft quotas in Quota Management, you can screen for files in active or passive mode. Active mode actually stops file creation; passive mode performs the actions you've specified while allowing file creation. As in Quota Management, you can set actions for the system to take when a user tries to copy a particular file type. For example, a user who tries to copy or write an invalid file type gets an Access is denied message, and the system writes more specific information about the action to the event log, as Figure 2 shows. You can fully customize the event-log text. Templates are supplied to help you define common screening configurations.
A Full Plate of Features
As you've seen, R2 packs many notable new features and enhancements to old ones. Some of these features, such as the new DFS replication engine, ADFS, and Quota Management, are significant enough to warrant an OS upgrade if you're not already running Windows 2003. Whether these features are worth the upgrade cost depends on the extent to which they could benefit your organization's IT and business processes and end users. But whether or not you're ready to take advantage of it, R2 is unquestionably a leap of progress for the Windows Server OSs.