Office suite takes wing with Win2000

Many enterprise IT organizations are exploring Windows 2000's myriad systems management features for deploying traditional applications, such as group policies and assigned applications, but few have yet to recognize the promise of Microsoft's IntelliMirror infrastructure.

IntelliMirror represents a fundamental advance for deploying client applications. You can now set a policy that enables mobile user profiles and facilitates just-in-time downloads of application code to the desktop. In our test lab, IntelliMirror yielded amazing improvements in the level of network traffic generated by server-based applications.

IntelliMirror employs a concept called client-side persistent caching. In the world according to Windows 2000, network volumes are more than just shared storage space. The volumes are also repositories for a common application code image that can be cached at the client level, letting multiple systems access the shared image concurrently with minimal network overhead.

Server-hosted applications are nothing new. IT planners have long been aware of the potential to reduce systems management costs by storing application code on the server. However, bandwidth limitations have made running all but the smallest and simplest of applications from the server impractical.

With Windows 2000 Professional's new Synchronization Manager application, a Windows 2000 client can connect to a shared network volume, download the code it needs to execute a server-hosted application and store the code locally in its disk-based network cache. The client downloads the code only once; subsequent accesses are made to the image in the cache.

Before IntelliMirror, the only way to achieve this kind of Windows application centralization was by deploying Windows Terminal Server (WTS), a less-than-perfect solution that requires an application execute directly on the server. WTS clients must remain continuously connected and use more network bandwidth than IntelliMirror, making WTS less flexible than a traditional client/server environment. WTS will still be part of Windows 2000, but we expect its role will be limited to deploying kiosk-style applications or letting administrators gain remote console access to a server.

Putting IntelliMirror to the test

We built a Windows 2000 test network to see how well IntelliMirror's cached-server-share architecture handles a classic application deployment scenario. We installed Windows 2000 Server on a Tyan BX-based system with a pair of 450-MHz Pentium II CPUs, 256M bytes of RAM and an Intel 10/100 Ethernet card. We installed Windows 2000 Professional on a BX-based client sporting a single 500-MHz Pentium III CPU, 128M bytes of RAM and an Intel 10/100 Ethernet card. The systems were the only devices connected to an Ethernet hub, the shared 10M bit/sec environment being a typical bandwidth-bound network.

To implement IntelliMirror, we set up an Administrative Installation of Microsoft Office 2000 Professional using a network share point on our Windows 2000 server as the target. We then created a new Active Directory organizational unit on the server and configured a new policy for our Office 2000 Users test group. The policy stipulated that all users in the group have Office 2000 installed, with the aforementioned network share point as the installation source. After a quick reboot of our client PC, we logged back on to the server, and Office 2000 was installed automatically and configured to "Run from Network" without any user intervention.

We got a baseline for bandwidth utilization by disabling all caching options at the share point. Using CSA Labs' OfficeBench 1.0, we executed a series of 15 test runs against the network share, using Windows 2000's new integrated performance monitoring and logging the Microsoft Management Console snap-in to log the server's average byte/sec counter. Once an initial flurry of activity subsided, the network showed a rather consistent 2.1M bit/sec level of traffic.

We then reconfigured the network share point so Windows 2000 clients would automatically cache program files as they were accessed. Once again, there was a flurry of initial network activity, after which network utilization dropped to a remarkably low 14K bit/sec as the client continued to execute the benchmark, this time almost entirely from cache. Testing across an additional five concurrent clients yielded predictable results, with the aggregate average bandwidth utilization never exceeding 100K bit/sec. As a point of reference, we also ran OfficeBench under WTS, returning a result of 545K bit/sec for a Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol session and 136K bit/sec for a Citrix Intelligent Console Architecture (ICA) session. Bottom line: One ICA Terminal Server client session generated network traffic equal to 10 concurrent IntelliMirror users.

As promising as these results are, they are, of course, preliminary. It remains to be seen how well IntelliMirror works with non-Microsoft applications. But if the results we observed in the lab continue under more heterogeneous conditions in the field, IntelliMirror may turn out to be the sleeper technology of Windows 2000.

The only catch is that you have to deploy Windows 2000 Server and Windows 2000 Professional before you can reap the rewards; IntelliMirror doesn't work with Windows 9x.

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