What's New in Branch Office Management
Introduction
Windows Server 2003 R2 delivers the underlying technologies needed for the seamless integration of branch office servers into the larger enterprise ecosystem. This update to the Windows Server 2003 operating system allows customers to retain the performance, availability, and productivity benefits of a local branch server while avoiding connectivity limitations and management overhead. This page provides an overview of benefits, new features, and improvements for branch office support in Windows Server 2003 R2.
Benefits
Improvements in the operating system help reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) associated with managing branch servers while ensuring high levels of branch office productivity.
| Benefit | Description |
Delivers centralized server functionality to branch office environment | Branch office employees will benefit from the performance and reliability of a local server, ensuring that productivity is not lost in the event of a wide area network (WAN) disruption. Additionally, if local servers become unavailable, clients automatically fail over by closest site selection and fail back to the preferred server when it becomes available. By ensuring that data is centralized, through WAN optimized replication, there is no need to provide for costly and often unreliable backups in branch offices. The benefits of local server productivity along with centralized management and data protection are no longer mutually exclusive. |
Remote administration eliminates need for onsite administrators | Improved management tools provide a one-to-many management experience and an enterprise-wide hierarchical view. Administrators will benefit from the familiar look and feel of Microsoft’s standard management interface which helps mitigate the need for onsite administrators or third-party consultants for resolving local issues. |
Mitigates limited bandwidth and high-latency of WAN infrastructures | State-of-the-art compression and remote differencing techniques ensure that data is available locally for high performance access while minimizing the amount of traffic placed on the WAN. |
New Features and Improvements
Windows Server 2003 R2 provides an integrated set of branch office features that work together to reduce branch office TCO by improving manageability, minimizing WAN traffic, and increasing availability. These features are all designed to support centralized management and data protection.
| Benefit | Description |
Distributed File System - Namespaces | Distributed File System (DFS) allows administrators to group shared folders located on different servers and present them to users as a virtual tree of folders known as a "namespace." A namespace provides numerous benefits, including increased availability of data, load sharing, and simplified data migration. |
Distributed File System - Replication | Windows Server 2003 R2 includes a completely rewritten replication engine for the Distributed File System. DFS Replication (DFS-R) provides a robust multi-master file replication service, which is significantly more scalable and efficient in synchronizing file servers than its predecessor, File Replication Services (FRS). DFS-R schedules and throttles replication schemes, supports multiple replication topologies, and utilizes Remote Differential Compression (RDC) to increase WAN efficiency. If WAN connections fail, data can be stored and forwarded when WAN connections become available. |
Remote Differential Compression | Remote Differential Compression is an advanced WAN-compatible compression technology that optimizes data transfers over limited-bandwidth networks. Instead of transferring similar or redundant data repeatedly, RDC accurately identifies changes and transmits only the changes required to maintain global file consistency. RDC can detect insertions, removals, and rearrangements of data within and across files. |
Print Management Console | With the new Print Management Console (PMC), administrators have a single interface for managing all printers connected to all print servers within an organization. Through PMC, administrators can monitor printer errors, deploy printer connections to clients, automatically find and install printers on a local branch office subnet, or run printer configuration scripts. PMC allows branch servers to perform as print servers because they can be managed remotely on a one-to-many basis. |
Enhanced Management Tools | Microsoft Management Console (MMC) 2.1 has been expanded to include an enterprise-wide administration framework for managing file and print services. This helps mitigate the need for onsite administrators or third-party consultants for resolving local issues. The DFS namespace is administered by using the DFS Management Console which provides a hierarchical view of the namespace. The enhanced DFS Management Console incorporates functionality that was previously only available via command-line interface (CLI). The DFS Management Console implements features from MMC 2.1, including in-the-box Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) reports and diagnostics. |
Summary
The combined technologies available in Windows Server 2003 R2 can mitigate some of the fundamental branch office integration limitations imposed by WANs and bandwidth-hungry file system protocols. These features also help reduce management costs associated with branch office servers by promoting centralized management. In the future, Microsoft foresees broadening its overall support for branch offices to include a comprehensive set of branch-optimized server roles.