Lower Total Cost of Ownership

   

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IT professionals who are responsible for managing file servers have asked for features that help them deliver services at a reduced cost. Windows Server 2003 includes some important advances that help achieve the objective of lower TCO. These include the following:

• Web user interface for server administration.

  Windows Server 2003 includes a Web-based management user interface for file servers. You can use this interface to manage your file servers from any browser. This interface allows you to change disk management settings, quota settings, and share settings.

• Command-line tools.

  In addition to the Web-based interface, Windows Server 2003 adds three important command-line tools for managing local storage:

  • Diskpart.exe manages partitions. It lets you create mirrors and stripe sets, extend volumes , and so on.

  • Fsutil.exe manages advanced NTFS features, such as the USN Journal, hard links, and quotas.

  • Vssadmin.exe manages the Volume Shadow Copy service.

• Automated System Recovery.

  Another important server management scenario is disaster recovery. Windows Server 2003 includes Automated System Recovery (ASR) to help with disaster recovery scenarios. ASR can help when you are faced with either the physical destruction of your hardware (for example, in an earthquake or a fire) or a catastrophic hardware failure.

In Windows 2000, recovering from a disaster is a long, manual process, which includes

1. Acquiring new hardware

2. Installing a basic version of Windows

3. Manually configuring the storage hardware to match the predisaster configuration

4. Installing your restoration software

5. Restoring the operating system settings

6. Restoring the application settings

7. Restoring the application data

The goal of ASR is to quickly and automatically bring a nonbootable machine to a state in which you can run a restoration program to recover data. ASR will configure the new storage to the same specifications as the predisaster storage; it will also restore the operating system, all applications, and settings. As opposed to the lengthy, manual process faced in recovering from a disaster when using Windows 2000 or an earlier-version Windows operating system, ASR in Windows Server 2003 presents the administrator with an easy solution. The process for recovering a system using ASR in Windows Server 2003 is as follows :

1. Boot from a Windows .NET Server CD, and choose Automated System Recovery.

2. Provide access to the backup medium and a previously prepared ASR floppy disk.

3. Take a long break ”you'll come back to a working machine with the operating system and all applications properly configured.

You need to prepare an ASR backup before running this process. An ASR backup is a regular system backup plus the creation of an ASR floppy disk. This disk contains important configuration information about your storage system (for example, the number and size of your partitions), as well as information about how to restore the backup that you just created.

What makes ASR work is a small amount of bootstrap code in the Windows setup program. If you boot from the CD and press the F8 key when prompted, you will enter the ASR bootstrap program. The ASR code in Windows Setup knows how to read the ASR floppy disk to reconfigure the storage system. The ASR version of Windows Setup will then install just enough of the operating system to run a restore program. ASR can then automatically invoke the restore program to restore the rest of the data from your ASR backup.

Microsoft provides a complete ASR solution in Windows Server 2003, which is fully extensible by third-party vendors offering backup solutions.

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