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Windows Server: sometimes you just have to use it.
December 15, 2018

Windows Server: sometimes you just have to use it.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Windows Server

Our organization is using a mix o a Windows Server along with Linux; essentially picking which is cost and application appropriate. For the majority of our on-premise application servers, Windows Server is still fairly ubiquitous. We are seeing fewer and fewer web applications requiring us to deploy it, though.

Windows Server is crucial in allowing us to use various applications from contact center applications, accounting applications, and various other internally developed software. The management infrastructure provided by Microsoft (WSUS, GP, AD) all facilitate the ease of ongoing maintenance, reducing the amount of labor and overhead for our various environments.
  • The KB documentation of upcoming patches is exceptional.
  • The community around Windows Server is strong and forthcoming with information.
  • Since Server 2008, the OS has become much more modular in the deployment of roles and features which has made for significantly easier configuration.
  • The overall performance of server 2016's UI feels worse than previous versions (running on the same HW spec in the same virtual environment).
  • Versioning schemes could be more transparent (IIS versions across OS versions, MSSQL versions, etc) and easier to follow.
  • Managing some security settings via the server registry is fairly cumbersome. Third party applications and community created scripts exist to ease these issues, but with the emphasis on security today, they should have their own control panel section instead.
  • Microsoft's experience homogenization between their desktop OS and server OS has added a lot of "fluff" and graphical flare to the server OS that isn't really needed and feels like it gets in the way, to be honest.
  • Windows server has facilitated us deploying the applications that we want to in order to make our business units work.
The clear advantage is that Windows Server is less intimidating to the uninitiated novice being that it has a GUI, well-documented process that you can see and follow rather than just executing commands in a terminal. At the same time, the growth and scope of Powershell allow you to do virtually anything from a terminal if you desire to do so.

Additionally, you have a company with a good track record and clear goals steering the direction and support of the OS, versus a community-driven open source OS. I'm not saying that is necessarily an advantage, but the stability of Microsoft is quite nice.
Cisco Unified Border Element (CUBE), Cisco Unified Communications Manager (Call Manager), Ubuntu Linux
Windows Server is well suited to applications that effectively require it, there's no way around it. They're also suitable if you don't have Linux proficient admins.

I would argue that with the robustness of nginix running on Linux, if you are deploying a web application, there isn't a lot of reason to deploy it on Windows via IIS rather than Linux unless you have specific vendor support requirements being that nginix is understood to handle more concurrent connections.