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Solid Business Operating System
February 22, 2017

Solid Business Operating System

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller

Overall Satisfaction with Windows Server

We use windows server on almost all of our internal infrastructure at our company. In addition, I recommend windows server day-to-day to my customers, in my role as a technical consultant.
  • Active Directory - It is an excellent and flexible directory service that integrates well with other Microsoft products - including cloud services like Azure and hybrid models. Extensive support for AD with other windows applications means it's our 'go to' directory service.
  • Ease of management. Both GUI and command line/powershell make management easy.
  • Terminal Services - RDP protocol works well, is fast and is easy to get running for remote workers.
  • Hyper V - virtualisation that's easy to understand and implement and has live migration and other features that can be expensive through competitors.
  • Licensing complexity and cost - particularly new 'per core' licensing cost is confusing - as is much of the Microsoft licensing ecosystem - server licensing, CALS, Open License vs. Volume License vs Retail vs OEM etc.
  • Windows updates process can be a bit of a job to manage. WSUS is good but not perfect.
  • Positive - change management is straightforward and easy either via traditional GUI controls or scripting through PowerShell.
  • Positive - extremely widespread support - both in breadth of information online, widespread subject matter experts and paid support from Microsoft or partners.
  • OS X and Linux
Windows vs. OS X. Windows scales so much better here. OS X in a server role is ok for one or two servers but does not have the enterprise feature set or associated complementary software products that Microsoft Windows has.

Windows vs. Linux. Both have their advantages. These days I find well configured Microsoft Windows servers can operate as reliably as Linux servers. Linux is certainly more resource efficient and in the past has had a much smaller resource footprint. Microsoft is addressing these concerns through the GUI less 'Core' installation option and the newly released 'nano' installation options.
Windows Server works well for most scenarios as it scales so well - from a standalone server in a small business to a hybrid model backed by Azure Directory Services to large businesses with an established Microsoft platform of dozens or hundreds of servers. My experience of Windows server is in medium businesses of around 300-500 staff with several dozen instances.