Upgrade DC's for a Win 7 rollout

I've been looking for information on the benefits of upgrading my DC's along with a Win 7 roll out which hopefully will happen sometime next year. My current environment is aprox 100 Win XP users and the backend is Win2k/2k3 DC's along with mostly 2k3 member servers. If I upgrade all my users to Win 7, I'm trying to identify the key benefits of simultaneously upgrading my DC's to 2k8 I.E. the performance/efficiency gains that users would see with the upgraded backend.

Has anyone seen information on this? I have run across stuff like this in the past but of course when I am specifically looking for it I can't find it. I'm looking for the high level info that I can present to management.

Cheers

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Comments

RobertKaucher

I cannot imagine that for a 100 client shop with a single site that there would be much benefit.

Here are the major changes between AD 2000 and AD 2008 R2:
Branch Cache
BitLocker/BitLoker-to-Go
AppLocker
Finer Grained Password Policies
Enhancements to Terminal Services such as TS App.
Direct Access
And all of the Trust and Rights Management stuff that came along in Server 2003 R2 and was expanded upon in 2008.
<TE members, Give me a hand if I am forgetting anything....>
For 100 clients I cannot see this stuff as really helping you. It would be hard to justify the cost. Now it might be time to consider getting rid of the 2000 Servers and upgrading to 2008 on those. But you have to consider the cost of hardware, NOS licenses, and CALs. I have an environment of similar size and would love to justify a move to Server 2008, but I just cannot justify it.

Claymoore

Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 are just Better Together.

I think Group Policy Preferences are the best reason to upgrade to 2008 DCs. The ability to replace the functionality of login scripts with GPOs as well as all the additional functionality GP Preferences provide is reason enough for me to switch.

Group Policy Preferences
Group Policy

Hyper-Me

Server 2008 is much easier to use than 2003 ever thought about being, although thats more of a selfish reason.

I have to agree with claymoore on the GPP's...they are lifesavers.

rsutton

I agree on server 2k8 being easier to use but that doesn't sell with management. I was thinking along the lines of what Claymoore said - they work better together. I remember reading this before and was looking for some info to back it up.

Also - we have two sites so the the AD replication upgrades would be nice + I wouldn't be scared to use DFS to replicate my files, I had troubles with DFSr in 2003.

RobertKaucher

rsutton wrote: »

I agree on server 2k8 being easier to use but that doesn't sell with management. I was thinking along the lines of what Claymoore said - they work better together. I remember reading this before and was looking for some info to back it up.

Also - we have two sites so the the AD replication upgrades would be nice + I wouldn't be scared to use DFS to replicate my files, I had troubles with DFSr in 2003.

Two sites? You did not mention this. Branch Cache is a good seller as well. I think this will be a mojor + for you.

Hyper-Me

I've also found DFSr to be a lot more reliable than FRS.

Perhaps thats just me, though.