Designed for medium to large businesses, Enterprise Edition is the recommended operating system for servers running applications such as networking, messaging, inventory, customer service systems, databases, and e-commerce Web sites. The Enterprise Edition builds on the strengths of the Standard Edition by adding support for high-performance servers and the ability to cluster servers together to handle larger loads. These capabilities ensure system availability regardless of a system failure or how large an application becomes. The Enterprise Edition provides support for eight-way symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), eight-node clustering, and 32 GB of RAM in 32-bit editions and 64 GB of RAM in 64-bit editions. The Enterprise Edition lets you increase server performance and capacity by "scaling up," or adding processors and memory. Key Features Include:
- Cluster service. Server clusters provide high availability and disaster
tolerance for mission-critical database management, file sharing, intranet data
sharing, messaging, and general business applications.
- Multiprocessor support. Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition, supports
servers with up to 8 processors.
- Metadirectory Services support. Microsoft Metadirectory Services (MMS) helps
organizations integrate identity information from multiple directories,
databases, and files with Active Directory.
- Hot Add Memory. Hot Add Memory allows ranges of memory to be added to a computer
and made available to the operating system and applications as part of the
normal memory pool. No rebooting and no downtime are required.
- Terminal Services session directory. This load balancing feature allows users to
reconnect easily to a disconnected session on a server farm running Terminal
Services.
- Windows System Resource Manager. The Windows System Resource Manager (WSRM)
enables an administrator to allocate CPU and memory utilization on a
per-application basis. This is a useful tool for server consolidation.