Next Generation Networking in Windows Server 2008

Rafal Lukawiecki; Strategic Consultant, Project Botticelli Ltd: rafal@projectbotticelli.co.uk

Chris thought this session was about food poisoning, but in fact it's about Italian painters… J

• Introducing Next Generation (NG) TCP/IP (crash course)
  
• Teaching us IPv6 assuming good knowledge of IPv4 (crash course)
  
• Discuss enhancements to Windows Server 2008 networking environment
  

We want tings faster, high connectivity, simpler administration—innovative concepts, not just flashy UIs.

Issues with Vista networking—throughput down-throttling during multimedia playback. Performance of large file copy (including local). MMCSS service is the problem. The faster your network, the more obvious this issue is. Will be fixed in Vista SP1 and Windows Sever 2008 RTM.

NG TCP/IP

Entire protocol stack re-written for first time since 1990—for security, performance, and developer support.

Three big scalability enhancements.

1. TCP window scaling, aids both sending and receiving.
   
2. Explicit Congestion Notification – Vista and WS2008 will listen for a packet that the router can send indicating that it is overloaded. If it gets such a packet, it backs off how much it is trying to send, so does not make the problem worse.
   
3. Multiprocessor scalability of NDIS 6.0. NDIS 5.1 did not allow the distribution of packets across processors.
   

Performance enhancements, through following a large number of RFCs (couldn't catch all of them) J

• No restart or reboot needed when configuring
  
• Policy based QoS
  
• Auto-configuring and self-tuning of IPv4
  
• Roaming in IPv4 and IPv6 better.
  

Security

• Full resistance to TCP/IP DoS attacks
  
• Multiple firewalls can be configured, and will not fight each other in the same way they do in XP.
  

CRASH COURSE IN IPv6

There is a university in the States with more addresses allocated than the whole of Asia. We will run out of IPv4 addresses in 2010 to 2011… (Vint Cerf)

• IPv4 makes p-2-p really hard
  
• Security is not built in from the ground-up.
  

3.4x10³⁸ addresses in the IPvb6 address space.

It does look like there are some security advantages to having an environment with both Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista. We should be looking at how to combine our plans for deploying Vista with our plans for deploying Windows Server 2008—we should be thinking about which Windows Server 2008 deployments will get us the best bang-for-the-buck.

Windows P2P is for IPv6 only. QoS is managed by GP—very cool demo showing how QoS can be used to restrict the bandwidth available to specific applications or specific IP addresses. Perhaps we could allow certain kinds of traffic if we knew that we could limit the bandwidth that was available to particular services, particular address spaces.

Check out http://www.xtseminars.co.uk