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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."
Love them or hate them, Microsoft is a factual software giant...
I run a few 2k8 servers and must say that there are very few features that distinguish it from 2k3. For me, those are the new remote-apps terminal server feature and hyper-v. not a whole lot has changed other than rearranging a bunch of stuff.
I've installed Win2008 a few times and it always surprises me that I have to dig up the driver disks for the storage controllers... never have to do that when I install Fedora or Debian.
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
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.
I can see why that would be a terrible idea for a server.
You can mock all you want, but I find decreasing the attack vector for an out of the box install a sensible approach. Something all server intallations should do, regardless of their creators image.
To add a voice: I'm seeing more Linux installs than Win2k8 and Vista combined. This many mean nothing, or may mean I'm seeing what the average person is seeing. Consolidation and cost are driving what I'm seeing. When you see a row of several hundred blades running RHEL (replacing Windows in some cases) it's fairly convincing.
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Yeah, I know. Thankfully a new installation is safely locked down so that you can only browse the Microsoft website. Imagine what might happen if you could browse the web freely. You might accidently end up here which everybody knows is a site full of trojans and malware.
A command line only Windows Server OS that is able to run on lower end hardware sounds good in theory, but the current implementation cannot provide most of the functionality of its non-Core counterparts. Is anyone using Windows Server Core 2008? If so, what do you use it for?
The terminal service gateway is also pretty good. A controlled way to allows TS from the Internet into the clients on the subnet.
Server 2008 has a much improved backup utility. It's easy to setup (I just make one backup job that repeats nightly), and will provide a BMR (Bare Metal Restore). The best part however, is the ability to assign multiple USB drives to a backup job. Which ever one is plugged in at the time, it will backup to it. This allows the admin or employee to swap drives before they leave office at night.
My only major gripe is that the backup utility will only do a file level backup. Exchange 2007 is not supported. In theory, you could stop the Exchange Store prior to the backups taking place, be we all know that's just not feasible. Instead, Microsoft states you *must* use a 3rd party backup program or their DPM 2007 product for backup/restore of Exchange! Damn :(
Life is not for the lazy.
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.
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Your experience would be average--for low-end stuff. Generally, if you have the money to be leveraging a lot of Windows Server, you have the money (and often need) your own DC, or a sizable chunk of one.
Anybody whose cup of tea is ASP.NET should be running, not walking, to Server 2008. IIS7 is so much more useful and performant it's not even funny.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
We just switched to 2k8 in my shop (not my choice, AD and Exchange are "mandatory") and I've gotta say, I don't like it.
The only new feature that I've seen is DFS and even that is broken. The UI design team moved stuff for the sake of moving stuff and made everything bigger and chunkier. It also spams new windows that have a tendency to put themselves in the background like nobody's business. Also, the new DC's are giving all kinds of DNS errors.
Now maybe the DFS and DNS problems will be worked out in time (it's a new setup) but I still don't like the UI.
I don't see the point of switching.
I have this vague suspicion that AC obtained his copy via the "Port 6881 Volume Discount Licence Program", so to speak...
Actually, despite what MS will tell you, a server should be fundamentally different to a desktop, it should have a lot less software installed... MS's server versions are quite the opposite, they're basically desktops with additional server applications installed, they have a ton of desktop related functionality that is completely useless on a server sitting in a rack somewhere.
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I'm actually really impressed with it as a workstation OS. It is as fast as XP due to the significantly fewer number of background services running as compared to Vista, with the prettiness and features of Vista (including Direct X 10 for gaming). Vista drivers work just fine. I installed it mostly as a joke after having received it at one of those Heroes Happen Here conferences, but now I don't even boot to my XP partition anymore.
Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am master of my fate and captain of my soul.
I've been using Server2008 x64 on my t61p laptop since it first came out.
It's great! It feels zippier than Vista. It has a smaller install footprint. (actually even wireless isn't installed by default: you have to add it manually). It's been completely rock-solid.
I even use Hyper-V when giving demos at conferences. (unfortunately Hyper-V doesn't cooperate with wireless and disables sleep/hibernate, so I can't use it routinely.)
Two position statements first: 1) I'm primarily a Unix sysadmin of multiple flavours and love it, 2) I've only used Server 2008 on my test VM network.
Having setup a private network thanks to a company purchased Technet subscription, I now have two Active Directory Domain Controllers, a WSUS server and Terminal Server. My take on 2008 is that when approached the right way, it's actually a very nice operating system.
I like the new Terminal Services seamless window capability, the default policy of only installing the minimum required services, the new look Server Manager, even IIS7 looks nicely moduler. In fact, I could imagine managing a network of 2008 machines in a way that I never could with 2003. Now that might be my lack of fundamental 2003 knowledge (I can use it, but wouldn't describe myself as a "Windows System Administrator").
The reality, even for us Unix/Linux advocates, is that we're probably going to have to interop with Windows Server from time to time, and if it's Server 2008 that I'm having to work with, then I can live with that.
Yeah, I know what you mean. IME, Linux is much more valuable to me because it offers more flexibility over the life of a system. If the organisation grows and I need more concurrent users, I don't need to worry about the license. If I need to add a service on an existing server, I don't need to worry about whether Moderately Enterprisey Edition has what I need, or if I can only do it on one of the Really Quite Enterprisey Edition boxes. I can install a zillion times in different VM's, and not have to read the EULA with a fine toothed comb to know if it was legal. In many ways, I'd consider an expensive Linux preferable to a free Windows.
That said, the Windows Server thing isn't that hard to grok. It's just market segmentation, plus a decision to only bundle the server and administrative application bundle with particular variations of the OS. If you prefer, think of it as buying the application bundle, and getting a free, tuned and tweaked version of Windows that is just there to run the expensive application bundle. Net result is that you don't need to worry about compatibility between the applications and your existing OS. MS comes to the table from a proprietary mindset. That's not inherently 100% terrible. And, more important than anything else, they bring some quite good tools. You can decide those tools aren't worth the headaches that come with MS for your situation. But, if you've ever set up NIS and NFS home directories on a bunch of Linux boxes, and you've joined Windows machines to a domain... You know that joining a Windows box to a domain is a heck of a lot more convenient than deploying NIS.
I'm a UNIX admin who has worked with Windows servers, but even coming from my "UNIX 4 eva" side of the fence, I have to admit that the MS solutions make some things very convenient compared to the most analagous UNIX options. Just make sure you know which edition you need, so you install the Windows Server OS that will actually use all of your RAM. :)
RHEL 5.3 still has tons more drivers than Win2k8. I know from very painful experience.
It's a natural consequence of
a) as mentioned before, the nature of the licensing, but probably more importantly...
b) the release cycle. RHEL is pretty good about timely major updates compared to eternities for MS service packs.
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Windows 2008's advanced firewall setting is now easier to use than iptables through webmin. I can finally configure an internet facing server securely!
The logic is simple... There is a special OS for a server so the cost can be different. There is no technical reason that Windows couldn't be like Linux and allow you to add every server component to a single base operating system, The only reason is that they want to charge people that buy servers with 256GB of RAM $3000 per server and those that run small companies $600 per server. Both companies get a good deal (of course, not as good as free).
Where I work, a typical server costs $5,500, Windows costs around $600, physically putting the server in the datacenter costs $2,000, and labor for installing, configuring, and supporting the server costs $3,000 over the its life. At the end of the day, Windows servers cost around $11,100. Switching to Linux would save us $600, reducing our costs by 5%.
A typical server with 256GB of RAM would run about $60,000. This server would require the Enterprise editions of Windows Server, so that would run about $3,000. The other costs would remain the same and at the end of the day, the OS is still only five percent of the total.
The fact that I have to activate my OS is annoying. With 2K3, there was a volume licensing option, but with 2K8, that option is gone, and I have to either allow my server to talk to a public Microsoft activation server, or run a KMS server in house.
Sorry, Microsoft, If you don't trust me, I don't trust you.
Wow dude, you're out there! First of all, there are a lot of people out there that value the straight forward setup approach that Microsoft often gives you for that high dollar. Of course when I'm running Oracle and spend many thousands on it I install it on a free OS but I certainly can't apt-get install Oracle.
Aptitude is great and all, but you're forgetting apt-get install apache-modssl, mod_mysql, php and the myriad of other things that usually have to get installed too in order to do anything useful with your webserver.
You also seem very misguided in the decisions that Bill Gates can make even though he no longer holds CEO or President as positions at Microsoft. He didn't do anything to which you give him credit for doing.
As for adding multiple cpu support, wtf? Why are you adding support to something that is universally supported in all camps and never required users to spend money to upgrade. Higher memory support was never a reason to pay for an upgrade as they always had the 4gig 32bit limitation. Windows 98 had trouble dealing with that amount of memory but that's because it handled memory like crap to begin with.
Furthermore, trivializing the differences between Windows does your cause no good as there have been plenty of upgrades on the Linux side that haven't gone so smoothly, as an Ubuntu user I can assure you the world is far from perfect and often requires time consuming research to troubleshoot issues that crop up such as why my Sangoma card won't initialize despite lspci showing the card and using matching drivers. In the Windows world I get a nice easy to read event log that doesn't require me to go trapesing through /var/log looking for something that will give me a clue as to the cause of the problem. As a side note Asterisk can be a real pain in the arse.
Anywho, those of us that aren't Linux only and aren't Windows only admins will continue to laugh at you and your poor attempts to attack something you clearly don't understand.
Here's a hint for you, Linux is not free, not by a long shot. Time to deploy new technologies with Microsoft has almost always been significantly faster than time to deploy new linux based services, note this does not state whether or not the deployment was better. That time costs real money and isn't worth a lot of people's efforts. Often times paying for something instead of developing a solution yourself is the smarter move and saves you money in the long run. Of course this is not always the case so naturally, use the right tool for the job. Sometimes its Linux, sometimes it's Windows. My main issue is grappling with which distro to use for which task. CentOS or Elastix for Asterisk is a hell of a lot easier than getting the whole rig running on Debian for instance.