Vista's 'Next Gen' TCP/IP Stack

Posted by Zonk on Friday December 8, 2006 @01:25AM from the i-thought-i'd-just-escaped-next-gen dept.

boyko.at.netqos writes "Microsoft's new Vista TCP/IP stack might be beneficial to businesses looking to increase use of their IT infrastructure... if they did it right. Ted Romer at Network Performance Daily writes: '[Vista] now allows us to throttle outbound traffic at a client or server. For example, you can throttle the bandwidth of a particular subnet to a particular server, giving some departments more access to the servers that they need. You can even restrict outgoing bandwidth for certain peer-to-peer applications like bit torrent. This shaping can also be handy when applied to servers, allowing less bandwidth for certain users/departments, and more for others. While consumers may debate whether Vista is a worthwhile upgrade, I believe it to be important for enterprise customers who will best be able to put Vista's capabilities to their fullest potential. Of course, I'm getting it for DirectX 10 games, but that's just me.'"

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Will it... by Threni · 2006-12-08 01:32 · Score: 5, Interesting

...let me choose how much bandwidth to allocate to each app, and their relative priority? I want my browser to go first, then Google talk, then any updates (OS, virus checker, firewall) and finally P2P. It's quite annoying that I can't do that on XP. Perhaps it's a tricky problem though.
Quoted portion leaves out important bit by BrianRoach · 2006-12-08 02:00 · Score: 5, Interesting

Rather interesting that the quote in the summary here on slashdot skipped this (emphasis mine):

FTFA: "Vista's ability to use centrally configured group-policies to push out policies to specific users or servers, and allows tagging of packets with the Diffserv code point values, so that our network infrastructure can see the marking and react to it in different ways - whether it's VoIP traffic, or TCP/IP business critical traffic, or web-surfing traffic. (Granted, this QoS doesn't guarantee anything, it just marks the packet in Windows and it is up to your network infrastructure to honor those tags.)"

So ... it really doesn't do much. It may be slightly more convenient to configure QoS on your routers based on the tags rather than port numbers ... but that's about it.

- Roach