Microsoft Windows NT 4.0

Microsoft Windows NT Enterprise Edition includes a license for use in servers with up to eight processors. Regular edition allows up to four processors in a single server. This is commonly referred to as symmetric multiprocessing, or SMP for short. In reality, only a handful of hardware vendors actually make servers with more than four processors. In fact, I know of only six or seven. If you want to go higher than eight processors, you’ll have to buy a license from the hardware vendor that makes a system with more than eight CPUs. That is because NT needs a different HAL for addressing more than eight processors. The only vendors that I know of that support more than eight processors are NCR and Sequent. The advantage of symmetric multiprocessor support is that it affords huge performance gains in both the OS and applications by executing their process threads across all of the CPUs.

There are four key OS differences from the Regular Edition of NT Server 4.0:

* Four-gigabyte memory tuning (4GBT)
* A license allowing the use of up to 8 CPUs in one server (Regular allows up to 4)
* No limit on concurrent users of the Mcft Message Queue Server product (MSMQ)
* “Wolfpack” or Mcft Cluster Server (MCS)

Apart from these differences, the Regular Edition is almost identical.

What’s in the Option Pack?
If you purchased your copy of NT 4.0 Regular or Enterprise Edition after January 1998, the Option

Pack CD is included. Burned onto it are the following products:

* MS Internet Information Server 4.0
* MS Transaction Server 2.0
* MS Index Server 2.0
* MS Message Queue Server 1.0
* MS Certificate Server 1.0
* Internet Connection Services for RAS
* Service Pack 4
* MS Site Server Express 2.0