Testers Evaluate Release Candidate of Windows 2000 Beta 3

The third beta release of Microsoft's Windows 2000 operating system is in the hands of a few beta testers and it's on track for a more broad release next month.

Although to fully discern how stable it is will require widespread testing, the early release candidate of Beta 3, dubbed RC0, is looking better than the last test release, according to two participants in Microsoft's Early Adopter Program.

The Windows 2000 beta still has its share of bugs and problems related to compatibility with older applications, although the latter is a problem Microsoft officials virtually acknowledged in the release of its Application and Developer Readiness Program, which offers tools to help developers address those problems.

But based on a week of testing, one customer was bullish on the improvements. "It's pretty stable for most of our applications out there," said Jason Bruner, manager of network systems administration at VoiceStream, a PCS carrier.

"On the workstation side, it seems to work almost seamlessly. We haven't discovered any major errors yet," Bruner said. "On the server side, it appears fairly stable. It's ready to go."

Memory leaks appear to be fixed. "Now we run many applications at once and it's pretty solid," he said. Microsoft has also added tools for improved cluster management. Windows Internet Naming Services (WINS), Domain Name Services and DHCP "are vastly improved," Bruner said.

But another beta 3 tester, an IT director at a Fortune 500 company that has a large installed base of Windows NT servers, and who spoke on condition of anonymity, said while it is improved, it is not yet ready for prime time.

"In my opinion it still needs work; they are not there yet," the IT director said, noting the biggest problem is with Active Directory. "I don't see that it is as scalable as NDS is and it's not as easily manageable as NDS," he said.

Peter Houston, Microsoft's lead product manager for Windows NT marketing, said it is possible the user didn't properly configure the directory, or perhaps there were other issues. "We are running the RC0 at Microsoft without any kind of performance or crashing problems. I know this is a high-quality release," Houston said.

Microsoft this week cited a benchmark performed at Compaq Computer's European Benchmark Center in France where 16 million user objects were loaded into Active Directory on a four-CPU AlphaServer 3100 machine with 2 gigabytes of memory. The database took up 68.8 GB with no degradation of response time.

Microsoft also cited tests by Cisco where 7 million objects in the directory were able to handle 5,000 queries per second, generated from 100 clients.

"We're pretty confident the directory is very stable," said Ray Bell, Cisco's director of engineering.

Microsoft officials said the commercial beta release is still on target for release next month.

Microsoft officials also took aim at addressing the compatibility questions of applications designed for earlier versions of Windows NT.

The company this week inaugurated its Windows 2000-based Application and Developer Readiness Program, aimed at providing guidelines to ISVs and corporate developers to make sure their applications are compatible with features in Windows 2000.

Notably that includes a specification for using Active Directory and the Windows Installer feature. The program launched by Microsoft will also include Windows logo certification requirements, tools and other resources.

Nevertheless, analysts do not expect Windows 2000 to ship until later this year at the earliest, while major deployments most certainly won't begin until next year, after Y2K implications are clear.