Windows 2008 Server — is it right for you?
Having now done a couple of Windows 2008 migrations most people have asked a question:
So it it worth it?
Short answer: No
I’m sure I will get lambasted by the people out there who love Windows 2008, all 7 of them, but having seen it, lived it, and understood it I can’t get behind it. I went through in my own hosted email company I own and upgraded to Windows 2008 and Exchange 2007. I love Exchange 2007, but much like Microsoft did in Ex2007 they completely changed most of the interfaces in 2008. I’m all about change, but nothing with Microsoft is ever simple.
There are enhancements to Active Directory like additional login information displayed, and the addition of IIS 7.0. There are also some downgrades, like the “user friendly” login interfaces and elimination of NT Backup, and being slower than molasses.
IIS 7.0
Let’s start here because to me this was a reason to upgrade. As with every other release of Windows Server, Microsoft did upgrade IIS to a latest greatest version. Unfortunately in doing so they took a rather simple and easy to user interface and turned it into something like looks like it came from a speak and spell.
As an admin I don’t have time to be fiddling around with little pictures of cute icons. I have learned an interface in IIS for quite sometime now that has never changed. Now looking at that interface. You can see that it has almost no familiarity to IIS 6.0 thus creating a whole new set of headaches. Very seriously it takes about 10 minutes to do something that used to take 3 minutes. As with all applications though not ALL is bad. Anybody that has ever tried to run PHP in IIS 6.0 knows that it will peg your CPU at 100% if there is a problem executing code — even in a custom application pool. In IIS 7.0 PHP does run much more nicely with very few crashes.
I will let you be the real judge of it all and save the rest of my opinions for another time, but the million dollar question is this:
Is it worth upgrading?
This is one tech who says no. Now, just because I don’t see the point in upgrading doesn’t mean that I encourage people to not upgrade either. For a new roll out I would setup a 2008 Active Directory environment with Exchange 2007. Microsoft will eventually meet end of life on 2003 and you will be stuck.
