What's the difference between MS Windows 2K Server and Advanced Server?

[bupkus]

What's the difference between MS Windows 2K Server and Advanced Server?

 

[spyordie007]

Windows 2000 Server
Windows 2000 Advanced Server

Generally speaking Windows 2000 Advanced Server supports more than Windows 2000 Server does, more RAM, more CPUs, Clusters, etc., etc.

Rather than asking such a broad question I suggest reading Microsoft's website about the 2 products and if you have any specific questions than ask.

-Spy

EDIT, I found a good quote on Google for you:

Windows 2000 Server and Advanced Server are virtually identical products; the difference between the two is the level of support. Windows 2000 Server supports four-way SMP and up to 4 GB of RAM. Advanced Server supports eight-way SMP and up to 8 GB of RAM on machines equipped with Intel's Physical Address Extension (an increase from NT Enterprise Edition's 4-GB limit). Advanced Server also supports 32-node TCP/IP network load-balancing, and has two-node server clustering for high availability.

 

[Nothinman]

Hard coded limitations put in by MS to make you pay more for the software to run more hardware.

 

[spyordie007]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Hard coded limitations put in by MS to make you pay more for the software to run more hardware.

Running more hardware requires more programming which equals higher costs which breaks down to a higher price, cry me a river.

-Spy

 

[drag]

I don't realy thinks so. At least not to an appreciable extent. For example going from 1 to 2 proccessors is a big deal.

But going from 2 to 4, or even 8 proccessor support is not anywere close as difficult.(at least in software, of course) The facilities are there for dividing proccess's up among 2 proccessors, all you have to do (as if it was easy) is expand on it.


Think about it. You said that Higher-end OS's cost more to support and create. But 2000 and 2000 advanced are pretty much identicle in every way, Exept that they differ in amount of proccesors they support, Ram (maybe, I forget), and concurrent connections.

Now MS's idea is of course is to take the advantage of multi-level marketing were you have different pricing structures and try to convince people that there is a valid reason for trying to obtain the more expensive version..

And in order to do that you must convince people that it is different, so you change the amount of personal and hardware it can support.

Do you:

1. Create 3 or more identicle operating systems based on one another and use unique code and performance tweaks to suit these differnet pricing structures?

2. Concentrate your programmers on just one version and then simply add a 10 lines of code that prevent the kernel from using more then 4 or so proccesors and limit the connections to so many users and another 12 lines of code to prevent the kernel from recognizing to much ram or disabiling the physical addressing extentions?

(Plus the clustering that 2000 is capable of isn't the nice way were the machines share resources. I beleive that they are just set up to back one another up if the other has to go down. Although I am not sure fo that...)

 

[spyordie007]

And if they had never wanted to build the server OS line in the first place do you think they would have bothered to put that support into the kernel in the first place? I'm not condoning Microsoft's business practices but things like this are quite common in just about every industry.

Of course they use the same base code, from a cost perspective it's much easier to simply limit the kernel for part of their product line rather than reprogram every one differantly. How many hardware manufacturers can you think of who have re-packaged the same core half a dozen differant ways for differant prices even though "the engineering" went into every single one?

Software is a product, the author has the right to charge as they see fit. Of all the software I've bought Windows is (in reality) one of the better deals out there. Yes there are "free" OSes as well and I fully support their usage and I'm not arguing that they shouldnt be free, after all where would the world be without open source?

-Spy

 

[Nothinman]

Running more hardware requires more programming which equals higher costs which breaks down to a higher price, cry me a river.

I'm not crying, if anything I'm laughing at those spending that much money because Microsoft makes them think 8 CPUs need a radically different processor scheduler than 2 CPUs, whether it's really there or not is anyone's guess as anyone that sees the code surely signs an NDA to never talk about it.

Obviously I'll use Linux for an example, with the 'O(1)' process scheduler by Ingo Molnar it takes the exact same amount of time to schedule 10 takes on 1 CPU as it does 10,000 tasks on 32 CPUs, the 4 CPU sweet spot for Linux is gone. And as an added bonus the new scheduler is simpler and easier to maintain from what I read.

Same thing goes for memory, the main thing is getting past 4G because of the 32-bit limits of the most common processors, once those are gone the rest is relatively simple. The trick is dealing with poorly designed devices or ISA devices that can't DMA to/from high memory, but that's a driver issue and the maintainers of those drivers know about those problems already.

And now Linux has things like NUMA support, hot-swappable CPUs and even a new kernel module system and through all of it the maintenance cost isn't growing exponentially for most people maintaining kernel code (except for the IDE people, but that seems to be because each manufacturer seems to treat the ATA spec a little differently, once the new IDE taskfile core is done it'll be much simpler to add special cases for 'bad' chipsets and drives) because most of it is inconsequential. Apply a new process scheduer and all the drivers still work just fine, same for the VM subsystem (we even saw this in action in 2.4.x for better or worse) and many other things.

I'm sure the only real code differences between Server and Advanced server consist of things like:

#ifdef advsrv
#define max_mem 8196
#define max_cpu 4
...

Of course Microsoft is free to market and sell their products anyway they choose, but that doesn't mean you're not paying for a placebo.

 

[drag]

Software is a product, the author has the right to charge as they see fit.

Sure they do, that's not what I was aurguing about, just the technical details of w2k vs w2kadv server.

Multilevel marketing is a well established and understood concept that is used in most every aspect of retail, from jeans to software to automobiles to magazine subscriptions. Of course besides the the fact that I realy don't think it's nessicary or wise to do so and I realy don't like the concept of charging different people different prices for the pretty much the same product, especially if you are the only real vendor, I can talk about it for what it realy is: A BS marketing parade.

 

[CTho9305]

Nothinman - is it also wrong for Intel to charge more for a P4 3.2 than a P4 2.2? The cost to them is the same for ALL... was it wrong for them to sell P3-based Celerons cheaper than P3s? The costs there were also the same. They could just sell only P4 2.8GHz chips, and trash the slower ones, and sell them all for a high price, if you'd like.

MS could only write single-CPU software, or could see that some people do want more performance, and then charge for the product differentiation and less for the standard software.
edit: do you laugh at people who don't buy the slowest chip out?

 

[Nothinman]

Nothinman - is it also wrong for Intel to charge more for a P4 3.2 than a P4 2.2?

Well I think the whole P4 itself is wrong =) I also think it's wrong for them to disable MP in the regular P4s and make you pay out the ass for Xeons if you want a P4 SMP workstation.

They could just sell only P4 2.8GHz chips, and trash the slower ones, and sell them all for a high price, if you'd like.

They could, but they need to keep making the 'slower' ones for replacements and the like.

Personally I do think it would be nice if they would release things at their top speeds possible, but Intel knows they can milk so much more out of people if they release them in small jumps. Like I said about Microsoft, it's their product and they can do what they want with it, but as long as I have a choice I'll have no part of it.

edit: do you laugh at people who don't buy the slowest chip out?

I laugh at people who do buy the fastest chip out, because it's usually magnitudes more expensive than the one right below it.