Lowering Windows 2000 TCO
April 17,
2000
By Ron Anderson
The metric that most cost-conscious organizations continue to grapple with as computers become more ingrained in their businesses is computer TCO (total cost of ownership). The Gartner Group estimates that the TCO for a networked PC in an organization without standardized management technologies is $13,200 per node annually, including hardware, software, support and administrative services.
Industry pressure from customers and competing technologies is gradually producing methodologies for reducing TCO by forcing vendors to embrace standardized management solutions. If you're planning for a large installation of Microsoft Windows 2000, look at its Remote Installation Services (RIS), which Microsoft has developed to reduce TCO. RIS also mitigates the need for tedious, repetitive tasks that sap time and vitality from your IS workforce.
Most large organizations have been using disk imaging or cloning software to automate OS installations, including some that are specially designed to deal with the requirement for unique Windows NT SIDs (system identifications). The biggest limitation to such technology is that the destination hardware needs to be identical to the cloned system. A far more flexible method, RIS goes a long way toward eliminating this limitation.
Good Pedigree
RIS implements a Win2000 Professional installation and disaster-recovery scheme based on the standards TCP/IP, DHCP, TFTP and Intel Corp.'s Wired for Management PXE (Preboot Execution Environment). Microsoft has added value to PXE by providing a wizard for getting up and running, by integrating with Active Directory (AD), and by offering utilities for creating images and to boot PCI-based systems that don't support PXE natively.
Because PXE is critical to this process, make sure the system BIOS is up to date on PCs with NICs on the motherboard. Win2000 RIS supports .99c or greater PXE ROMs. The PXE code on PCI-based NICs should be flashed to the latest version as well.
How It Works
RIS is based on PXE, a standard feature on most new NICs, including those built into the motherboards of new PCs. Microsoft has gone a step further by providing a utility, RBFG.exe, that creates a PXE boot floppy. The boot floppy will work with about 20 popular PCI-based NICs. This utility enabled us to use RIS with some of our older lab machines that didn't offer built-in PXE support.
RIS requires a functional DHCP server that has dynamic IP addresses. If RIS and DHCP are running on the same server, they work together to send the information your PXE client needs to start a remote installation. If they are on separate servers, the PXE client sends a DHCP discover packet to find the DHCP server and the RIS server. The client gets an IP address from the DHCP server and the IP address of the TFTP server that is running on RIS from the RIS server. The client contacts the TFTP server, which sends a client installation wizard to the remote boot computer and asks the user to log in. Once the user is authenticated, the BINL (Boot Information Negotiation Layer) server running on your RIS server does a directory lookup specific to the user and provides the installation wizard with a list of the images to which the user has access. Access to specific images is controlled at the user or group level within AD (see "The RIS Boot Sequence," Below).
In the Beginning
We installed and tested RIS at our Syracuse University Real-World Labs®. RIS requires AD and an NTFS (NT File System)-formatted partition other than the partition on which the server OS resides. If RIS sounds attractive but you aren't interested in AD, consider configuring AD on a small scale even if it will support only RIS initially.
The RIS partition should be large enough to hold all the images you'll need to create. The disk space required is less than you might think because RIS includes an active process, SIS (Single Instance Storage), that keeps disk space requirements to a minimum. SIS looks for duplicate files throughout your installation images. When it finds a duplicate, it replaces the file with a small pointer to the other copy. During our tests we developed five different images, all with Office 2000 Premium preinstalled, plus the original flat image, for a total of 3 GB of disk space on the RIS server. Without SIS, the configuration would have consumed about 5 GB.
After we ran through the setup wizard, we booted a system to perform our first RIS installation, only to find it wouldn't work. The system booted, contacted the DHCP server and got an IP address, then paused and displayed a message that no server could be found. We were using a DHCP server running on an NT 4 server and suspected that might be the problem, especially after we transferred the DHCP service to a Win2000 server and got things running without a hitch. It didn't make sense that we couldn't use our original DHCP server, and Microsoft agreed. It turns out we needed to use the MMC (Microsoft Management Console) DHCP plug-in to "authorize" the RIS server as a DHCP server, even though it wasn't running DHCP. In this case DHCP and BINL are linked, and we were authorizing the BINL server to do directory lookups--not an intuitive process.
Microsoft has simplified the setup process through a wizard, but there are some gotchas to avoid. Follow the directions in
"Step-by-Step Instructions on Getting RIS Going," and you'll save some of the time we lost during our original failed attempts.
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