By John Leyden, VNU Net
Fundamental design problems with Microsoft’s Active
Directory (AD) that will affect early adopters of Windows 2000
(W2K), will not be fixed until next year, a senior analyst has
warned.
Ed Thompson, an analyst at Gartner, said the design
problems, which involve network performance and the stability
of directory services when deployed to over 300 sites, are not
fixed by the recent release of Service Pack 1 for W2K.
Likewise, W2K Datacenter Server, released last Friday, does
not address problems which include the stability of
AD.
Other areas of concern include the broadcast of global catalogue
replication, which means that replicating Exchange 2000 databases,
for example, will cause a flood in traffic that affects network
performance. It is also possible to overwrite other people’s
changes to group policy in AD, which Thompson said could run
contrary to an enterprise’s security policy.
“These problems are not easily fixable – they are design
issues,” said Thompson, who added that Microsoft will have to
rework the product to fix these problems and that this can not be
expected until the release of Whistler, Microsoft’s next
full-version upgrade.
This is expected by Gartner in the fourth quarter of next year,
but users are likely to become entangled in design issues with AD
later this year or early next. This is because roll-outs of
Microsoft Exchange will present the first compelling reason to
deploy AD.
“So far, most companies are just dabbling with AD and have not
got into these problems,” said Thompson. “These problems have only
been seen by joint development partners, and companies who got into
it fast. Most users will bump into these issues at the point when
they have Exchange roll-outs.”
Nick McGrath, W2K product manager at Microsoft, said: “Amongst
the many mainstream customers I come across, I’ve not come across
this issue.”
Pressed on the design problems highlighted by Gartner, he said
that he was not aware of them and expressed confidence that
organisations who plan AD deployment properly would be
successful.
McGrath said that a number of companies have already deployed
AD, although he declined to say which, and that successful
deployment depends on planning and design. He said to get the most
of W2K, organisations would have to roll out AD, and provided this
was successfully planned, users would not hit any significant
problems.