Windows Server 2000 is one of the four editions of the Windows 2000 operating system line, and is intended for use on server systems. It is the most basic server edition available in the Windows 2000 line. Released on 17 February 2000, it is the successor to Windows NT 4.0 Server, and was succeeded by Windows Server 2003.
Windows Server 2000 is one of the four editions of the Windows 2000 operating system line, and is intended for use on server systems. It is the most basic server edition available in the Windows 2000 line. Released on 17 February 2000, it is the successor to Windows NT 4.0 Server, and was succeeded by Windows Server 2003.
The primary difference between Windows 2000 Server and Professional editions is Server's ability to run server services such as WINS, Active Directory and DNS services. Additionally, Windows DNS System was first introduced in Windows 2000 Server.
Notable differences between Server and Advanced Server or Datacenter Server include:
- The standard Server variant does not support clustering
- Advanced and Datacenter variants support
Physical Address Extensions, allowing for up to 8 GB RAM in Advanced and 64 GB in Datacenter, as well as allowing for additional CPUs - TCP/IP load balancing is available in Advanced and Datacenter variants, and not in Server
- Separate Advanced and Datacenter variants ("Limited Edition") were released to support IA64 CPU architecture, no such editions were released for Server.
- Fault tolerance, failover and load balancing functionality are available in Advanced and Datacenter variants, but not in the standard Server edition.
More information is available at the Wikipedia article on Windows 2000.
