14 DAY TRIAL // In the same sense in which Windows Vista is an evolution over Windows XP, Windows Server 2008 is the next stage in server operating system development compared to Windows Server 2003. One of the areas where Microsoft has focused its efforts with Windows Server 2008, is in resolving limitations inherent to the previous version. In this context, users of Windows Server 2003 are aware of restrictions associated with the MS Distributed Transaction Coordinator.
"In Windows Server 2003, you are limited to a single MSDTC cluster resource and in fact, in order to conduct ANY transactions on a Windows Server 2003 cluster, you are required to have an MSDTC cluster resource. This limitation of having only one MSDTC resource introduces (various) side effects," revealed Jim Carley with the directory and service business.
According to Carley, the MSDTC restrictions generated additional issues with similar resources in other groups, affected transactional application resources and created dependencies with products requiring transactions.
"Being limited to a single MSDTC resource means that other resources in other groups that need to use transactions experience performance degradation when that application resource runs on a different node in the cluster than the MSDTC resource. Two transactional application resources that do not have any relationship to each other except for transactions are both affected if the single MSDTC resource fails. Some products that require transactions to install (such as the action of creating a COM+ package) need to be installed AFTER the MSDTC resource is created, producing install order dependencies," Carley added.
All of these problems have been solved with Windows Server 2008. With Microsoft's last 32-bit server operating system, the company will allow users to create and manage multiple MSDTC resources. In this sense, Microsoft has separated application groups from the MSDTC instances in 2008, also separating and isolating the effects of failures. The installation ordering issues have also been dealt with "local" (non-clustered) MSDTC instance associated to process transactions.