By Peter Pawlak [bio]
Posted: Apr. 3, 2006

The following is a sidebar accompanying an article published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. More samples of our content, as well as a list of upcoming articles and reports are also available.

Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003, released in Feb. 2006, rolls up all hotfixes issued since SMS 2003 first shipped in Dec. 2003 and includes a few new features and performance enhancements.

Support for SQL Server 2005. SMS 2003 can now use either SQL Server 2005 or SQL Server 2000 to store settings, inventory data, and status information. Although using SQL Server 2005 does not add any new capabilities to SMS, it allows organizations to standardize on the new version of SQL Server.

64-bit client support. SMS 2003's Advanced Client (a client program must be installed on each computer managed by SMS) can now be used on 64-bit x64 and Itanium computers, although the client itself is still a 32-bit application.

Further reductions in NetBIOS dependency. Even though the latest Windows client and server versions no longer depend on the network-protocol independent NetBIOS API, which has been supplanted by the TCP/IP-specific Windows Sockets API and fully qualified domain names (FQDNs), SMS 2003 still depends on NetBIOS for some functions. This reliance sometimes caused customers to run and maintain the Windows Internet Naming Service (WINS) solely to support SMS, creating extra effort and network traffic (clients must be configured to register with WINS) and creating a possible single point of failure unless multiple WINS servers are maintained. Even though SMS's two service packs do not eliminate SMS's use of NetBIOS, SMS 2003 SP1 allowed SMS to use Domain Name Services (DNS) instead of WINS to resolve NetBIOS names, and SP2 permits wider use of FQDNs instead of NetBIOS names.

More multithreading. With SP2, SMS 2003's software inventory processor component has been rewritten to use multithreading, which allows it to run faster and with less impact on other SMS services on servers with multiple processors or cores.

SMS 2003 SP2 isn't an all or nothing proposition—-customers have the option of upgrading their SMS 2003 servers and clients with the code included in SMS 2003 SP2 in stages. However, some new features in SP2 will not work properly until all involved computers have been updated.