Windows 2000 Performance Guide

Chapter 11.  Introduction to Networking Technology

This chapter provides an overview of Windows 2000 networking with a particular emphasis on performance and capacity planning considerations. Network performance is an enormous topic, one that we could easily devote an entire book to. Our goal here is more modest. We introduce the most important networking concepts that affect performance, reviewing the basic technology associated with both local area networks (LANs) and wide area networks (WANs). We focus on the combination of networking technologies that are most common to Windows 2000 environments, which means we primarily discuss Ethernet, IP routing, and TCP. Because Windows 2000 networking services are built around the suite of networking protocols known as TCP/IP (commonly associated with the Internet), we are on familiar ground. Windows 2000 network performance concerns overlap considerably with the concerns of other computer systems that run the familiar TCP/IP environment.

We focus on the available metrics for measuring networking performance and the most commonly used utility programs available for Windows 2000. We concentrate on those network performance objects available using the System Monitor and introduce the use of the Network Monitor for analyzing individual packets. The Network Monitor is a software-based packet sniffer included in Microsoft’s System Management Server suite of tools.

In this chapter, we illustrate basic networking concepts using familiar ...