Thursday, April 9, 2015

What you say? Windows Nano Server? Looking great, but…

As we all know by now Microsoft Announced Windows Nano Server edition to be released in the Next version of Windows Server yesterday. Here are some of my thoughts about it :).
In my years as a IT consultant, architect, trainer and scripting fanatic I love to see evolvements in the IT landscape.

As an early adopter for PowerShell back in 2006 when it was sort of launched with Exchange Server 2007 I really love to see what you can do with it. I wrote and still write a lot of advanced scripts to make our lives easier in the admin and migration process. I also am involved in the design and architecture of new Windows based infrastructure and trying to get customers or IT admins to adopt the new and rich possibilities the Windows Server and Windows client OS brings.


For some years now I’m trying to convince a lot of my customers to move on to use PowerShell and Windows Server Core edition (no personally not 2008 (I think this version was not really good), but since 2012), but still a lot of IT Pro’s and IT admins still don’t know how to use PowerShell and what you can do with it. To be more clear, I still see that IT admins for example are trying to change the same setting for 4000+ users within Active Directory. Not very efficient I think and also very fault sensitive. Therefore the adoption of Windows Server Core Edition is not happening as quickly as I would have wanted to see.

And this is where I have double feelings about Windows Server Nano. I personally I think it’s great to see you don’t have any overhead anymore in forms of a GUI, local logon, no more WOW64 support and many other stuff. I love to work with remote PowerShell. I think connecting to a server with RDP and then do your stuff on it is slow and you are limited to a maximum number of sessions. Also all these components require updating and installing a lot of hotfixes and patched and so on.
Removing all this overburden leaves you a much more hardened server, a lower footprint (less harddisk space, memory, etc). It also saves you the installation of a lot of updates that you don’t need and leave you with a lot of potential security risks if you don’t install them.

However, as I wrote earlier, in my experience is that the adoption of these new evolvements with the current generation of IT Pro’s (Yes unfortunately I now a lot of IT consultants and engineers that still don’t know how to use PowerShell) and IT admins is a thing to worry about while getting Windows Nano and Core edition server to be adopted.

I do hope it will be a success and personally I will adopt it and recommend it in my advise and designs to customers, but there needs to be a real change in the IT landscape and mindset of IT related people. I think…

Do you guys have any thought on this?

Let me know… I like to have interesting discussions about it :)


Reference:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsserver/archive/2015/04/08/microsoft-announces-nano-server-for-modern-apps-and-cloud.aspx