Windows Server 2003 (sometimes referred to as Win2K3) is a server operating

system produced byMicrosoft, released on April 24, 2003.] An updated version, Windows Server
2003 R2, was released to manufacturing on December 6, 2005. Its successor, Windows Server
2008, was released on February 4, 2008. It is based on Windows XP, basically becoming an
enhanced version of XP. According to Microsoft, Windows Server 2003 is more scalable and
delivers better performance than its predecessor, Windows 2000.

Overview
Windows Vista, as shipped, was developed based solely on Windows Server 2003 source code
Windows Server 2003 was the follow-up to Windows 2000 Server, incorporating compatibility and
other features from Windows XP. Unlike Windows 2000 Server, Windows Server 2003's default
installation has none of the server components enabled, to reduce the attack surface of new
machines. Windows Server 2003 includes compatibility modes to allow older applications to run
with greater stability. It was made more compatible with Windows NT 4.0domain-based
networking. Incorporating and upgrading a Windows NT 4.0 domain to Windows 2000 was
considered difficult and time-consuming, and generally was considered an all-or-nothing
upgrade, particularly when dealing with Active Directory. Windows Server 2003 brought in
enhanced Active Directory compatibility, and better deployment support, to ease the transition
from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows Server 2003 and Windows XPProfessional.
Changes to various services include those to the IIS web server, which was almost completely
rewritten to improve performance and security, Distributed File System, which now supports
hosting multiple DFS roots on a single server, Terminal Server, Active Directory, Print Server, and
a number of other areas. Windows Server 2003 was also the first operating system released by
Microsoft after the announcement of its Trustworthy Computing initiative, and as a result,
contains a number of changes to security defaults and practices.
The product went through several name changes during the course of development. When first
announced in 2000, it was known by its codename, "Whistler Server"; it was named "Windows
2002 Server" for a brief time in mid-2001, followed by "Windows .NET Server" and "Windows
.NET Server 2003". After Microsoft chose to focus the ".NET" branding on the .NET Framework,
the OS was finally released as "Windows Server 2003".

Development
Windows Server 2003 was the first Microsoft Windows version which was thoroughly subjected
to semi-automated testing for bugs with a software system called PREfastdeveloped
by computer scientist Amitabh Srivastava at Microsoft Research. The automated bug checking
system was first tested on Windows 2000 but not thoroughly.

Amitabh Srivastava's PREfast found 12% of Windows Server 2003's bugs, the remaining 88%
being found by human computer programmers. Microsoft employs more than 4,700 programmers
who work on Windows, 60% of whom are software testers whose job is to find bugs in
Windows source code.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates stated that Windows Server 2003 was Microsoft's "most
rigorously tested software to date."

Changes
The following features are new to Windows Server 2003:

Internet Information Services (IIS) v6.0

Significant improvements to Message Queuing

Manage Your Server a role management administrative tool that allows an

administrator to choose what functionality the server should provide

Improvements to Active Directory, such as the ability to deactivate classes from

the schema, or to run multiple instances of the directory server (ADAM)

Improvements to Group Policy handling and administration

Provides a backup system to restore lost files

Improved disk management, including the ability to back up from shadows of files,
allowing the backup of open files.

Improved scripting and command line tools, which are part of Microsoft's initiative to bring
a complete command shell to the next version of Windows

Support for a hardware-based "watchdog timer", which can restart the server if the
operating system does not respond within a certain amount of time.

The ability to create rescue disk was removed in favor of Automated System Recovery (ASR).

Editions
Windows Server 2003 around late 1999 comes in a number of editions, each targeted towards a
particular size and type of business. In general, all variants of Windows Server 2003 have the
ability to share files and printers, act as an application server, host message queues, provide

email services, authenticate users, act as an X.509 certificate server, provide LDAP directory
services, serve streaming media, and to perform other server-oriented functions.

Supported hardware capabilities across editions of Windows Server 2003[12]

Criteria

Web

Standard

Enterprise

Datacenter

Maximum physical CPUs

64

IA-32

2 GB

4 GB

64 GB

64 GB

x64

N/A

32 GB

1 TB

1 TB

Itanium

N/A

N/A

2 TB

2 TB

Maximum RAM

Web
Windows Server 2003 Web is meant for building and hosting Web applications, Web pages, and
XML web services. It is designed to be used primarily as an IIS 6.0 Web server and provides a
platform for developing and deploying XML Web services and applications that
use ASP.NET technology, a key part of the .NET Framework. Terminal Services is not included
on Web Edition. However, Remote Desktop for Administration is available. Only 10 concurrent
file-sharing connections are allowed at any moment. It is not possible to install Microsoft SQL
Server and Microsoft Exchange software in this edition without installing Service Pack 1. Despite
supporting XML Web services and ASP.NET, UDDI cannot be deployed on Windows Server 2003
Web. The .NET Framework version 2.0 is not included with Windows Server 2003 Web, but can
be installed as a separate update from Windows Update.
Windows Server 2003 Web supports a maximum of 2 physical processors and a maximum of
2GB of RAM. However, an instance of Windows Server 2003 Web cannot act as a domain
controller. It is the only edition of Windows Server 2003 that does not require Client Access
Licenses when used as the internet facing server front-end for Internet Information
Services and Windows Server Update Services. When using it for storage or as a back-end with
another remote server as the front-end, CALs may still be required.

Standard
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard is aimed towards small to medium-sized businesses.
Standard Edition supports file and printer sharing, offers secure Internet connectivity, and allows
centralized desktop application deployment. A specialized version for the x64 architecture
(AMD64 and EM64T, called collectively x64 by Microsoft) was released in April 2005.[14] The IA-32
version supports up to 4 physical processors and up to 4 GB RAM; the x64 version is capable of
addressing up to 32 GB of RAM[and also supports Non-Uniform Memory Access.

Enterprise
Windows Server 2003 Enterprise is aimed towards medium to large businesses. It is a fullfunction server operating system that supports up to 8 physical processors and provides
enterprise-class features such as eight-node clustering using Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS)
software and support for up to 64 GB of RAM through PAE (added with the /PAE boot
string).]Enterprise Edition also comes in specialized versions for the x64 and Itanium
architectures. With Service Pack 2 installed, the x64 and Itanium versions are capable of
addressing up to 1 TB and 2 TB of RAM,respectively. This edition also supports Non-Uniform
Memory Access (NUMA). It also provides the ability to hot-add supported hardware. Windows
Server 2003 Enterprise is also the required edition to issue custom certificate templates.

Datacenter
Windows Server 2003 Datacenter is designed for infrastructures demanding high security and
reliability. Windows Server 2003 is available for IA-32, Itanium, and x64 processors. It supports a
maximum of 32 physical processors on IA-32 platform or 64 physical processors on x64 and IA64 hardware. IA-32 versions of this edition support up to 64 GB of RAM With Service Pack 2
installed, the x64 versions support up to 1 TB while the IA-64 versions support up to 2 TB of
RAM. Windows Server 2003 Datacenter also allows limiting processor and memory usage on a
per-application basis.
This edition has better support for storage area networks (SANs): It features a service which
uses Windows sockets to emulate TCP/IP communication over native SAN service providers,
thereby allowing a SAN to be accessed over any TCP/IP channel. With this, any application that
can communicate over TCP/IP can use a SAN, without any modification to the application.
The Datacenter edition, like the Enterprise edition, supports 8-node clustering. Clustering
increases availability and fault tolerance of server installations by distributing and replicating the
service among many servers. This edition supports clustering with each cluster having its own
dedicated storage, or with all cluster nodes connected to a common SAN.

Derivatives

Windows Compute Cluster Server

Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 (CCS), released in June 2006, is designed for high-end
applications that require high performance computingclusters. It is designed to be deployed on
numerous computers to be clustered together to achieve supercomputing speeds. Each
Compute Cluster Server network comprises at least one controlling head node and subordinate
processing nodes that carry out most of the work.
Compute Cluster Server uses the Microsoft Messaging Passing Interface v2 (MS-MPI) to
communicate between the processing nodes on the cluster network. It ties nodes together with a
powerful inter-process communication mechanism which can be complex because of
communications between hundreds or even thousands of processors working in parallel.
The application programming interface consists of over 160 functions. A job launcher enables
users to execute jobs to be executed in the computing cluster. MS MPI was designed to be
compatible with the reference open source MPI2 specification which is widely used in Highperformance computing(HPC). With some exceptions because of security considerations, MS
MPI covers the complete set of MPI2 functionality as implemented in MPICH2, except for the
planned future features of dynamic process spawn and publishing.

Windows Storage Server

Windows Storage Server 2003, a part of the Windows Server 2003 series, is a specialized
server operating system for Network Attached Storage (NAS). Launched in 2003 at Storage
Decisions in Chicago, it is optimized for use in file and print sharing and also in Storage Area
Network (SAN) scenarios. It is only available through Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).
Unlike other Windows Server 2003 editions that provide file and printer sharing functionality,
Windows Storage Server 2003 does not require any client access licenses.
Windows Storage Server 2003 NAS equipment can be headless, which means that they are
without any monitors, keyboards or mice, and are administered remotely. Such devices are
plugged into any existing IP network and the storage capacity is available to all users. Windows
Storage Server 2003 can use RAID arrays to provide data redundancy, fault-tolerance and high
performance. Multiple such NAS servers can be clustered to appear as a single device, which
allows responsibility for serving clients to be shared in such a way that if one server fails then
other servers can take over (often termed a failover) which also improves fault-tolerance.
Windows Storage Server 2003 can also be used to create a Storage Area Network, in which the
data is transferred in terms of chunks rather than files, thus providing more granularity to the data
that can be transferred. This provides higher performance to database and transaction
processingapplications. Windows Storage Server 2003 also allows NAS devices to be connected
to a SAN.

Windows Storage Server 2003 R2, as a follow-up to Windows Storage Server 2003, adds fileserver performance optimization, Single Instance Storage (SIS), and index-based search. Single
instance storage (SIS) scans storage volumes for duplicate files, and moves the duplicate files to
the common SIS store. The file on the volume is replaced with a link to the file. This substitution
reduces the amount of storage space required, by as much as 70%
Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 provides an index-based, full-text search based on the
indexing engine already built into Windows server.[16] The updated search engine speeds up
indexed searches on network shares. This edition also provides filters for searching many
standard file formats, such as .zip, AutoCAD, XML, MP3, and .pdf, and all Microsoft Office file
formats.
Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 includes built in support for Windows SharePoint Services and
Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server, and adds a Storage Management snap-in for the Microsoft
Management Console. It can be used to manage storage volumes centrally,
including DFS shares, on servers running Windows Storage Server R2.
Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 can be used as an iSCSI target with standard and enterprise
editions of Windows Storage Server 2003 R2, incorporating WinTarget iSCSI technology which
Microsoft acquired in 2006 by from StringBean software. This will be an add-on feature available
for purchase through OEM partners as an iSCSI feature pack, or is included in some versions of
WSS as configured by OEMs.
Windows Storage Server 2003 can be promoted to function as a domain controller; however, this
edition is not licensed to run directory services. It can be joined to an existing domain as a
member server.