Re: Installation of ISA Server 2006 Problems

Tech-Archive recommends: Repair Windows Errors & Optimize Windows Performance

"ZVR" <no_spam_ever@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:44f13dfb$0$5661$9a6e19ea@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Come on, the Web Edition of Windows 2003 is intended to be an
application
server. It clearly is not very stripped down

What?? It is _very_ stripped down when you compare it with the other
editions. Just take a look at the official comparison page:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluation/features/comparefeatures.mspx

and aside from not being
qualified to be a domain controller, there aren't good technical reasons
why
it shouldn't play many application server roles.

You want a good technical reason? Here's one for you - the Web Edition
doesn't support anything above 2 Gb of RAM and 2-way SMP. This would not
be
enough for most modern application servers nowadays. Yes, ISA included -
depending on the environment, 2 Gb of RAM can be very little for ISA.

Let's look at the list whose URL you published. Here are features found in
standard edition of Windows 2003 that really have no particular value for a
proxy server:

Active Directory
Active Directory Migration Tool
Active Directory: install replica
Cross-forest trust
Services for Macintosh
Shadow copies of shared folders
Access Control Entry (ACE) Editor
Group Policy Management
Intellimirror Management
Remote Install Services (RIS)
Renaming Domains
User State Migration
DHCP with DNS in AD
IAS Proxy
Print Server
UDDI
Windows Media Services
ADFS Web Agents

Of all of the features, I found only two that would have value for *some*
enterprise implementations of ISA Server, and even then only if they need a
lot of additional processing on the ISA Server:

4-way SMP
Support for 4 GB of RAM

Operating system theory says that for I/O copy operations, performance
*degrades* as you increase the number of CPUs. A file server, as the
simplest example of such a server, usually performs better with one or two
processors than with eight. A firewall is for all of its complexity not
much more than an intelligent network I/O application. There are mostly
table lookups and lots of copying of packets from one network interface to
another. It is not a CPU intensive application. What can make it CPU
intensive is when you start to run third party applications - like virus
checking software - on the same box. But that's not a default condition.
If you did a lot of hardware-unassisted encryption on the box, you probably
also benefit from more CPUs. But a small company, running a basic firewall
configuration, doesn't need that additional CPU or memory.

The fact that firewalls are not normally CPU intensive accounts for why
there are many successful Checkpoint implementations running today on 200
MHz CPUs. We have such a firewall, running 12 network interfaces with low
amounts of traffic at 10/100 speeds in a DMZ, with 256 MB of memory under
Windows, and it works very fast. I've never seen physical memory
exhausted on that box once.

Even accounting for all of the bloatware in Windows 2003, I'm pretty sure
Microsoft can pull off a basic firewall in 2 GB of memory and with two
processors, and they would probably be able to service 50% of the small
company market with that product.


The rest is just marketing. If Microsoft made a marketing decision to
force people using ISA Server 2006 to buy a more expensive OS, that's
okay.

Sure marketing plays a role. But why don't you look at the matter from the
other end of the stick? Maybe MS made a marketing decision to offer a
cheaper, stripped-down version of W2K3 for people that didn't need more
than
an IIS-enabled machine. Now you come and complain that this (cheaper)
version doesn't also run ISA... next thing you know, people will complain
it
doesn't run SQL Server, Exchange, and so on. Come on.

Well, believe it or not, there are small companies out there with all of the
above listed applications running just fine on Windows 2000. They could
probably keep limping along for the next five to 10 years and things would
work. Having some economic alternative for upgrading is not a bad thing to
offer smaller customers. For larger customers, I'm sure Microsoft is
good enough at marketing that it can come up with value added features that
require the more expensive OS. It's just basic market segmentation. You
have to size both application and OS to the target customer.


I just want to know what the marketing decision was so I can plan
appropriately. (But please don't pass this off as a technical issue,
because clearly it isn't.)

It's both. If you want, the technical side of it supports the marketing
decision that was made when the product line was defined. Surely you don't
see a problem with the way a company decides to market and sell their
products? After all, you don't walk in a car dealership, choose and pay
for
the most basic model in the lineup, then expect to receive all the extras
(A/C, power everything etc) for free, do you?

Well, there is a Standard version of ISA Server 2004, and there is an
Enterprise version, and it was simply my hope that they would have matched
the Standard Server to a less expensive OS, as an option.

To be honest, ISA Server 2004 on Windows 2000 works. I guess we could
stick with that for a very long time. We had just purchased a lot of the
Web Edition of Windows 2003, and I was hoping to get some leverage out of
money we already spent. The upgrade to ISA Server 2006 was just an
impulse buy, and I guess I can postpone that impulse.

--
Will


.

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