Is Windows NT Workstation really the same as Windows NT Server? In the days of Windows NT 3.1, workstation and server were functionally identical with RAID support and Macintosh client support on server being the only distinguishing factors. In the NT 4 world, the workstation and server really are differentiated in function, performance characteristics and capacity. From a performance perspective, the differences are:
Virtual DOS Machine
NT workstation preloads the VDM during boot whereas NT Server does not. This gives workstation a performance boost in how fast it loads the first 16-bit application.
Caching
Caching is set on workstation to favor disk access whereas it is set to favor network throughput in server.
Server service memory management
The Server service can be tuned for an application server or a file/print server. This is the official Microsoft party line. This dialog is not available in NT Workstation, but the registry setting found in rtips144 will allow you to gain equivalent tuning in workstation.
SRV.SYS
The workstation server service and drivers get paged to disk to conserve memory. Under NT Server, this does not occur since srv.sys is core to the server performance.
The capabilities/services only available under server are:
Domain logon validation and domain security model
Gateway Services for Netware
IIS Web Services
RAID
Services for Macintosh
There is a personal IIS web server for workstation but it should not be confused with the IIS which runs under server. Microsoft created different capacities for workstation versus server:
Concurrent client connections
Workstation is limited to 10 simultaneous network connections whereas server has no builtin capacity and is only limited by operational factors such as memory and type of network card. This makes workstation an adequate "server" for a small workgroup but unfeasible for a larger network to function as a "server".
Remote access sessions
Workstation supports 1 RAS connection whereas NT Server supports 256 under RAS. Using 3rd party software, NT Server supports an unlimited number of remote access connections.
Processors
Workstation supports 2 CPUs whereas NT Server supports 4 CPUs. NT Enterprise supports more processors for servers whereas OEM versions of NT server allows 32+ CPUs.