I’ve just written a whitepaper on the features and deployment of Serivce Pack 2 for Windows 2003, Windows 2003 R2 and Windows XP x64.
This document will discuss the features of Windows 2003 Service Pack 2. On the face of it, there
are few changes made to the feature set of Windows 2003 by this service pack. It does appear to
hold to the promise made by Microsoft about making radical changes to the operating system in
service pack releases. There are some changes behind the scenes. But one big change that users
of RIS will notice is that their Remote Installation Services (RIS) deployment will be replaced by
something new called Windows Deployment Services. WDS has been introduced to facilitate the
deployment of Windows Vista. And something else is different too … this Service Pack 2 for
Windows Server 2003 is also intended to be the first service pack for Windows XP x64.
I’ll go over the deploying the service pack and the changes made by it at a high level. I was
hoping to go into greater detail on WDS but the document just got bigger and bigger before I got
there. I’ll save WDS for another document.
Note: This document is based on the beta release of Service Pack 2 that is available from
http://connect.microsoft.com. I in no way condone the use of beta releases on production or valued
network resources. All of my testing has been done using VMware’s virtualisation products.
The document continues …