Windows Server 2008 One Year On — Hit Or Miss?

magacious writes "Friday marked a year to the day since Microsoft launched Windows Server 2008, but did it have quite the impact the so-called software giant expected, or did it make more of a little squeak than a big bang? Before its arrival on 27 February 2008, it had been five long years since the release of the last major version of Windows Server. In a world that was moving on from simple client/server applications, and with server clouds on the horizon, Windows Server 2003 was looking long in the tooth. After a year of 'Vista' bashing, Microsoft needed its server project to be well received, just to relieve some pressure. After all, this time last year, the panacea of a well-received Windows 7 was still a long way off. So came the new approach: Windows Server 2008."

Comments

No news is good news

[LibertineR]

Bottom line: It just works. Nice new GPO features, Hyper V is fine, but overall, nothing to get terribly excited about other than the fact that there have been few negative issues.

Outside of removing ISA Server from the Small Business suite, I've read very few negative opinions on 2K8. If you dont need 64-Bit goodness, it might not be worth upgrading from a stable 2K3 environment.

Re:I expected more driver support

[mysidia]

This is really an about face... 10 years ago, Linux was the platform you often couldn't get running due to missing hardware drivers -- you really had to be very careful about what hardware you chose.

Also, Windows 2000 was the easy-to-use OS.. Linux was the server OS with usability issues..

Is it starting to change, so that Linux is actually more usable than Windows server?

That would be the day...

Now if only we could get a true match for Windows Active Directory. So that the software on Windows Desktop machines, works EXACTLY as if the environment was powered by Windows servers, Exchange for e-mail, etc.

Re:Can't answer your question

[zappepcs]

The data center where my servers are is a mixed client data center. It's not the decision of a single company there. There is one company who is using Windows server 2k3 but they are not upgrading. Some of their stuff is moving to Linux/Solaris. The RHEL stuff is a different company that replaced all their Windows servers and went full on RHEL. In my area, we use a mix of Win2k3, Solaris (5.8-10), and Linux (CentOS). There is a ton of telecomms stuff in half the data center as well. I'm not seeing any growth in Windows servers, quite the opposite. That's why I thought my experience might be 'average' so to speak.