There was an interesting article over at Network World that caught my eye today - Vista over the WAN:  good but not great.  As I have been immersing myself in WAN technologies lately, this has piqued my interest.  I admit that I somewhat agree with the reviewer - the experience over the WAN is better, but it isn’t the end-all be-all experience that I think MS was aiming for.

I must admit, though, that the Windows Vista networking experience has not been very positive.  Autotuning works well, but forget about using a Vista machine connecting to a Windows 2003 R2 Server or Terminal Server.  The TS/RD experience is painful on the LAN due to the “pauses” that autotuning causes.  What is weird, although predictable, is that TS/RD connections over the WAN with autotuning “enabled” provides an experience like XP or other W2K3 servers.

Vista to Longhorn Server (Beta 3) over the WAN did provide a significant boost to reliability.  In the off hours, I attempted a few tests in connecting and disconnected the WAN session to see how Vista/LH Server handled these interruptions.  XP based workstations and W2K3-R2 servers would immediately pop-up a network error and result in mild system hangs and timeouts.  I didn’t experience this with the Vista/LHS combination.  This would be a welcome relief not only to those who have a WAN setup between branch offices, but also those who are on marginal wireless network connections.

One thing that I have noticed is that DFS Replication in W2K8 Server hasn’t been significantly improved over the offering in R2 server.  For our system, I am having to push several GB of replication data across the WAN to our hot backup server (and local branch office server) and I ended up having to disable RDC (Remote Differential Compression) due to the tremendous system loads that this presented to our system.  Some of this is due to the type, format, and sizes of data that we produce in this office (i.e., AutoCAD drawings and Access  Databases).  RDC has to work too much to track all of the changes that are saved every 10 minutes for all of our workstations (10 minutes is the autosave time in AutoCAD).  I was hoping for some sort of additional tweaking of the RDC mechanism, but I have not experienced this as of yet.

In summary, there are improvements for WAN-related communication, but nothing that I would call earth-shattering.