First on the Windows block

Active Directory worth hassle; Terminal Server surprises, users say.

By John Fontana
Network World, 02/14/00

This week, while most enterprise customers are cracking the seals on their first copies of the final code for Windows 2000, a few hearty souls already are running the operating system in their production environments.

Pioneers to some, guinea pigs to others, these early adopters report mostly positive experiences so far on both the desktop and server. As expected, Active Directory was a chore to deploy but is producing tangible returns.

A sleeper feature has been Terminal Services, which many are using to remotely administer Win 2000. As for glitches, several have been reported, including applications and network tools that don't run on the new operating system, missing drivers and spotty integration with other operating systems.

But for HomeLife, a furniture retailer that recently broke off from Sears Roebuck and Co., and the University of Texas College of Business, Win 2000 is meeting their expectations for a more reliable and easier-to-manage server.

At the college, production deployment began last fall with beta code.

"We went out on a limb, but the products worked," says Tim Matthews, associate director for technology at the college and a self-proclaimed regular on the bleeding edge.

Matthews now supports 5,000-plus students on more than a dozen Win 2000 servers, including four machines that support a College of Business domain, two that support a universitywide domain and two that run technologies such as Dynamic Host Connection Protocol (DHCP), Domain Name System and Windows Internet Naming Service, which are used to locate network resources. The servers mainly are running prerelease Win 2000 code.

The biggest project has been the school's Home Drive, a network storage system in which students house their NT profiles and up to 200M bytes of data each. The Home Drive generates so much network traffic that Matthews held an extra server in reserve fearing the system would buckle. "We weren't sure we would get enough throughput from the operating system, but it's holding up under the load," he says.

Problems for Matthews and colleague Pat Lett, senior network analyst, have focused on missing drivers and disappearing DHCP servers - issues that Microsoft has addressed.

Active Directory also has consumed Matthews and Lett. The network professionals had to design the directory for the entire university before they could begin building their own organizational units, segments of a directory that contain information on certain users, groups and resources.

"We had domains all over the place, so we consolidated them to one domain in NT 4 before migrating to Win 2000," Lett says.

Matthews' advice: "Don't modify the Active Directory schema unless absolutely necessary." Changes to schema, which define a directory's structure, can fracture Active Directory as new organizational units are brought in.

One of the most pleasant surprises has been Terminal Server.

"I can dial in to the network, open a Terminal Server client and administer the box from any location," Matthews says. "After I make changes, I don't have to reboot the machine like with NT."

Another user's view

Terminal Server also delights HomeLife Chief Information Officer Chris Smith, who went live with Win 2000 just three days after the code was finalized.

"I always thought Terminal Server was something you used for applications you couldn't deploy on a WAN," Smith says. "But we use it to manage servers."

Smith, who is in the enviable position of starting from scratch with his network after HomeLife split off from Sears, is running 150 Win 2000 desktops and 25 servers at the company's Hoffman Heights, Ill., headquarters. Eventually, he will have some 2,600 users on more than 150 servers in 133 stores around the country, all linked over a frame relay network.

The stores will use the network to access a set of Unix-based retail applications deployed in Hoffman Heights. Forecasting and enterprise resource planning applications will run centrally on Win 2000, which also will handle file/ print, messaging, and public and private Web-based applications.

Smith's biggest problems have been the absence of Microsoft's System Management Server, which has yet to be certified for Win 2000, and the fact that some of his network monitoring tools won't work with Microsoft's new software. He also says setting policies and security parameters has been a much more involved task than anticipated.

With Active Directory, HomeLife took its time to get its installation right.

"We went through several iterations and went back several times to craft [our implementation of the directory]," Smith says. With the directory domain for headquarters functioning fine, Smith will fill in other parts of the directory pertaining to regional groups and individual stores.

Smith's recommendation is to hire someone to help with the deployment or prepare for it to consume you for an extended period of time.

Matthews, at the University of Texas, recommends training all IT staff in Active Directory and Win 2000.

"And test everything in the lab," he says. "Once you go live and get Active Directory in place, making any major changes is a headache."