Back in October 2009, Microsoft released Windows Server 2008 R2, together with Windows 7. With these two concurrent releases, DirectAccess first became available. Naturally, quite a few organizations were already using pre-release versions of Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7, and being early adopters of DA. Meanwhile, Microsoft was working on UAG, and decided early on to integrate it with DA, as it is Microsoft's main remote access product anyway.
With UAG, deploying DirectAccess is very simple. It integrates many of the configurations you need to make into a single, friendly wizard. It also incorporates IPv6 to IPv4 translation technologies, allowing you to deploy DirectAccess even if your network hasn't been fully migrated to IPv6 (yes! You can deploy DA with virtually no knowledge of IPv6! Hooray!). Another advantage is NAP integration (we discussed NAP briefly in Chapter 8), which is available without UAG, but is much simpler to configure if UAG is in the...