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Dell Feature and Functional Testing for Windows Server 2008

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Dell Feature and Functional Testing for Windows Server 2008 Dell Feature and Functional Testing for Windows Server 2008 By Barun Chaudhary and Manjunath Narayanan April 2008 Windows Server® 2008 is Microsoft’s first major Server Operating System release in five years. Dell’s close partnership with Microsoft has allowed engagement with the testing and development of this operating system for more than 4 years. Some of the highlights of Dell’s testing efforts include compatibility tests on Dell™ PowerEdge™ server platforms, testing upgrade and migration scenarios, and testing compatibility of OpenManage™, the Dell systems management software. Whenever there were new features or technology included with the Milestone or Beta releases, Dell endeavored to ensure that as many of our platforms and OpenManage components were ready to support those features as possible. Based on the current status of testing, Dell is committed to supporting more than 40 currently shipping and legacy server platforms across 5 generations with Windows Server 2008. Supporting this number of servers has required significant development efforts to help ensure good customer experience. Dell has a set of internal tools to track various parameters like test results, defect tracking, total time spent, driver or firmware changes, etc. Dell estimates it has spent more than 1800 hours testing currently shipping and future Dell servers for compatibility with Windows Server 2008. An additional 1700+ hours were spent at Dell to help ensure OpenManage will be compatible with Windows Server 2008 on as many platforms as possible. To serve this purpose more than 30 different configurations were tested on different Dell platforms. In addition to these efforts, Dell has spent more than 750 hours testing various Windows Server 2008 features on the entire supported server line. Different development teams within Dell—like Operating Systems Engineering, OpenManage, BIOS, Network, Platform development, Storage Controller & Equipments and other test teams—have worked with their partners world‐wide to deliver new platforms, components and drivers designed to meet Windows Server 2008 requirements. Additionally, considerable work has been done to help ensure that as many legacy platforms as possible can be supported on Windows Server 2008. In the process of all this development and testing, Dell discovered and worked to resolve more than 500 issues specific to Windows Server 2008 and Dell hardware and software. Dell is committed to the validation of Windows Server 2008 and its features with the following three objectives: 1. Support Windows Server 2008 on future and shipping platforms. 2. Support OpenManage on Windows Server 2008. 3. Support legacy Dell platforms to the fullest extent possible. In order to support Windows Server 2008 on Dell platforms, Dell has spent thousands of man‐hours testing Microsoft’s next generation OS, Windows Server 2008. As part of Dell’s process for new product testing, the scope of the project was defined and test strategies for the product were planned. The overall Test Cycle is summarized below. Test cycle at Dell for Windows Server 2008 OS Build Release Schedule: Dell received the Build Release Schedule from Microsoft, and based on this, a testing roadmap was defined. During different build releases, Microsoft often provided a list of the new features or functionality that were included in the release. Based on a feature’s availability, the Dell team extended the test scope and test plan to test the feature extensively. Any failure in the functionality of the feature was reported to Microsoft and was tracked by our defect tracking system. When a fix was available from Microsoft, Dell engineers performed a regression to verify the fix. Test Execution Schedule: The particular Microsoft release was evaluated, and based on the test scope and test planning, the execution schedule was set to help ensure that any possible failure could be reported in time to be fixed in the next release. Test Completion Approximation: Based on the feature configuration details and setup complexity, approximated time for completion of the test iterations was calculated. High Level Risks: Finally, Dell engineering teams identified the potential risks for the test iterations and support of the OS on the platform under testing. The overall test cycle is documented in Figure 1. 2 Fig. 1 Dell has carried out functional and feature testing for Windows Server 2008 in four categories:‐ 3 • Hardware Dependent Feature testing • Operating System Feature testing • Drivers testing • OpenManage testing Hardware Dependent Features: • WHEA (Windows® Hardware Error Architecture) • OA 2.0 (OEM Activation) • WinPE 2.1 (Windows Preinstallation Environment) • TPM (Trusted Platform Module) • ACPI (Advance Configuration & Power Interface) • Native IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) • Dell RAC 4 and Dell RAC 5 (Remote Access Card) Operating System Features: • WDS (Windows Deployment Services) • Windows Server Backup • BitLocker™ Drive Encryption • WER (Windows Error Reporting) • WinRE (Windows Recovery Environment) • Removal Storage Management Drivers testing: • Native and non‐native network driver testing • Native and non‐native storage driver testing With Windows Server 2008, there are a number of features like WHEA, ACPI support, TPM, etc. that required a change in the system BIOS for supported Dell platforms. Engineers at Dell have consistently worked to provide a BIOS that meets these requirements. As Windows Server 2008 added new functionality for customers, Dell provided enhancements to the system BIOS to help ensure that as many of the supported servers can support the additional functionalities as possible and customers can make best use of the new features. However, it is important to note that some of Windows Server 2008’s new features ‐‐ including WHEA, OS Watchdog Timer, and TPM BitLocker ‐‐ are hardware dependent, and as a result, are not available on some of the platforms Dell plans to support. If you have specific questions about available features, please contact your Dell sales representative. 4 For operating system feature testing, Dell has contributed to the development by partnering with Microsoft during the testing cycle and getting fixes in order to make a feature functional on Dell platforms. Dell has worked hard to identify needed drivers and worked with our partners to get as many drivers “built‐in” to the OS as possible. Our device driver testing has shown that we have made great progress with this, as more than 85% of device drivers for 5 generations of servers are native with the operating system. All the native drivers and non‐native drivers that Dell uses were tested to check for failures and to help ensure that unused native drivers would not have conflicts or other issues. For the drivers that are not native with the OS, customers can obtain them by using either the System Build and Update Utility (SBUU) media shipped with Dell servers or by downloading them from Dell’s support site at http://support.dell.com During the test cycle, Dell identified the functional impact of the new features mentioned in the above bullet points and conducted rigorous testing of Dell servers with the operating system in those areas. Some of the major impacts are mentioned below: Dell carefully implemented changes over several releases of the affected system BIOSes and tested these through multiple broad system test cycles, as well as numerous specific compliance tests. The changes implemented were used and tested throughout Windows Server 2008 testing, and went through at least two full quarterly Extended System Test cycles. WHEA ‐ Windows Hardware Error Architecture (WHEA) is a new feature with Windows Server 2008. Dell has implemented this feature through the system BIOS for all shipping platforms that are expected to receive the Designed for Windows Server 2008 certification. OA 2.0 ‐ With Windows Vista® and Windows Server 2008, Microsoft and Dell have worked together to develop OA 2.0 which is an anti‐piracy technology for these operating systems. OA is an alternative to Windows Product Activation (WPA) that does not require activation over the Internet. OA helps customers avoid the hassle of the activation process and this feature is supported on all Dell systems that ship with Windows Server 2008 installed. BitLocker ‐ One of the key security enhancements from Microsoft is the BitLocker Drive Encryption introduced with Windows Server 2008. This feature can be used to encrypt the entire drive and can prevent a system from booting without the proper token or password. Dell has helped simplify the BitLocker encryption implementation by providing servers expected to receive Designed for Windows Server 2008 certification with a Trusted Platform Module (TPM). A TPM is basically a secure micro‐ controller that adds cryptographic functionalities, so that an external key or storage device is not needed, but the system remains secure. The Dell PowerEdge™ server implementation is designed to meet or exceed Microsoft’s requirements of TPM Specification 1.2 compatibility. Dell has performed substantial testing of TPM/BitLocker on numerous Dell systems, and worked with Microsoft to help make the BitLocker configuration simple and secure. 5 Windows Server 2008 supports the latest two generations of DRAC (DRAC 4 and DRAC 5). Because the Windows Server 2008 installation technique is quite different from preceding versions, a substantial amount of firmware development work was done to help maximize performance and reliability of
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