Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
Second comment on the thread, and it's already been Godwin'ed. I _am_ impressed.
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.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
It's not useless, and in fact, it's the very first thing I thought to myself when I read the summary.
To further your own analogy, how seriously could you take an article that, in it's first paragraph dismissed the Nazi Germany as a something the world over-reacted to, and never should have taken seriously?
It sets a tone, that perhaps the author's views are badly colored.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
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.
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.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
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."
I have this vague suspicion that AC obtained his copy via the "Port 6881 Volume Discount Licence Program", so to speak...
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.
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. :)
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.