14 DAY TRIAL // In the evolution from Windows Vista to Windows 7, Microsoft is advancing a collection of technologies designed to provide network traffic management. Quality of Service (QoS) core networking components in Windows 7 are set up to permit the throttling of traffic by monitoring and measuring available bandwidth as well as network conditions. Charley Wen, the program manager for Windows Core Networking, emphasized that Microsoft continued to be committed to the evolution of Quality of Service and to the addition of new features. In this context, Windows 7 will bring to the table a Quality of Service improvement labeled URL based QoS.
“If you’re familiar with Policy based QoS you know that in Vista an IT administrator can create a policy based on the application name, source and/or destination IP addresses, source and/or destination ports, and the protocol (TCP, UDP, or both),” Wen explained. “We’ve learned since then that many enterprise applications have been, or will be, hosted on web servers and accessed from a browser, so the IT administrators would love to be able to prioritize or control the network traffic from those web-based applications, provided that a convenient configuration is available. To answer their request, we’ve added a new configuration option: you can create a policy based on the URL of an HTTP server.”
According to Wen, administrators will be able to easily optimize the delivery of content in a corporate network, preventing certain scenarios in which the network would become congested or even overwhelmed. Microsoft has of course tailored QoS for the ballet of Windows 7 clients and Windows Server 2008 R2 (Windows 7 Server) machines via ISS servers. The throttling is done through a URL based QoS policy, which ensures that all users get a seamless and smooth experience. With Windows 7, Microsoft takes QoS one step further compared to Windows Vista, in which it introduced qWAVE and Policy based QoS.
“qWAVE, or Quality Windows Audio Video Experience, is designed to estimate the network bandwidth, intelligently mark the application packets (with proper DSCP values), and interact with the application in the event of network congestion or fluctuations of available bandwidth (so that the application can take appropriate actions),” Wen added. “Policy based QoS (...) is intended to enable IT administrators to apply QoS to applications (which don’t need to have native supports of QoS), computers, and users in their enterprise network. It is especially beneficial to an organization with branch offices, where the WAN link capacity is limited and users tend to experience unpredictable network delays when accessing files or applications hosted on the main campus (or a different branch office).”
Windows 7 Beta is available for download here.
Product keys to activate Windows 7 Beta are available here.