Windows 2000 "On The Verge" Of Shipping

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September 15, 1999 (3:22 PM EDT)

Despite some last-minute repackaging of high-end load-balancing capabilities, Microsoft's long-awaited Windows 2000 operating system is "on the verge of shipping," CEO Bill Gates said Wednesday.

Gates said component load-balancing capabilities in Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Data Center needed additional polishing for management and accessibility issues before Windows 2000 ships later this year. They will be released instead in a new Application Center Server next year or through technology preview program.

"It is something that we really need to beef up," Gates told thousands of attendees of Developer Days via videotape.

"Our customers told us load-balancing management was not as accessible as we would like it to be," Gates said. "To meet these needs, we are packaging that in an extension built into Windows 2000 that provides for easy deployment, easy fault tolerance, and easy load balancing."

Microsoft essentially decided it had to remove some high-level features of Windows 2000 to ship the long-delayed OSes this year, said Rob Enderle, analyst with Giga Information Group, in Santa Clara, Calif.

"Clustered deployments would be on very large sites anyway, and many of them are actually waiting for Merced [Intel's 64-bit processor] to roll out anyway," Enderle said.

Announced Monday, the Application Center Server, which handles many other services in addition to dynamic load balancing and fault tolerance, should be available by the middle of next year, a Microsoft spokesman said. However, through a preview program users can download the component load-balancing feature, which was in Windows 2000 Beta 3 and RC1.

"Our customers told us they liked load balancing, but they needed more. They needed better management," said Craig Beilinson, a Windows 2000 product manager. "Component load balancing will not be in RC2, but any customer can simply pick up the phone and call product support and get a technology preview of component load balancing, which is the exact same code."

Beilinson called it a "packaging decision," but said the preview lets customers have access to it concurrently with Windows 2000.

Some 18,000 attendees in 32 cities holding Developer Days, an event designed to educate and energize developers to write applications for Windows 2000, were scheduled to receive copies of Release Candidate 2 of Windows 2000, but were given RC1 instead. A spokesman for the Redmond, Wash.-based company said the RC2 code went to manufacturing on Wednesday and would be shipped to beta testers and Developer Days attendees soon.

RC2 is one of the final milestones to shipping Windows 2000, which is due out next quarter.

Microsoft Monday began full-throttle campaign to cultivate developers, offering an upgraded Visual Studio developer system 6.01, the Windows 2000 Developer's Readiness Kit, and the Visual Studio Solutions Center for Windows 2000.

Also on Monday, Steve Ballmer, president and Paul Maritz, developer group vice president, hosted an event in San Francisco to outline a new set of Web tools, Distributed InterNet Architecture management tools, to make it easier to administer clusters of Windows servers.

At DevDays, Gates said the company is "one the verge of shipping Windows 2000" and said it is supported by 580 OEMs, 140,000 developers and 500,000 customers who have participated in a beta-testing program.