Exchange 2000 Certified for Datacenter Server -- Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine Online

Exchange 2000 Certified for Datacenter Server

By Scott Bekker
04/05/2001

Microsoft Corp. has certified its other major enterprise server for its high-end Windows 2000 Datacenter Server operating system.

A Microsoft spokesman confirmed this week that Exchange 2000 Server passed the stringent certification test at Veritest labs.

Microsoft's SQL Server 2000 was the first application to pass the Datacenter Server certification test back in December. Exchange is the sixth application to earn the logo.

Microsoft created a more selective application certification program with Windows 2000. Unlike previous programs that ended with some variation on a "Microsoft certified" logo, the Windows 2000 logo program was designed to highlight the applications that take the most advantage of all Windows 2000 features. Previous programs were partly intended to demonstrate platform momentum, emphasizing a raw number of applications with a logo.

As of today, 215 applications from 103 vendors are Windows 2000 certified.

The logos come in four progressively more stringent varieties, Certified for Windows 2000 Professional, Certified for Windows 2000 Server, Certified for Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Certified for Windows 2000 Datacenter Server.

The Datacenter Server application certification program has only been available for a few months. To earn the logo, applications must support several high-end capabilities in the Datacenter Server OS, including 32 processor SMP, greater than 4 GB of RAM and four-node clusters.

So far, Microsoft is the only company to certify applications on Datacenter Server, with its database and e-mail servers completing the test. Other software certified for Datacenter consists of management tools and utilities.

By contrast, Windows 2000 Advanced Server has two third-party applications certified for use with it: IBM's DB2 Universal Database and Baan's ERP 5.0. Counting tools and utilities, there were 15 Advanced Server certified applications in VeriTest's official list.-

Other software certified for Windows 2000 Datacenter Server:
BMC Patrol for Windows 2000 Servers 2.1
NetIQ Application Manager Suite 3.5
Veritas Backup Exec for Windows NT/2000 8.5
Veritas NetBackup 3.4.1