Why Windows is not a good server OS.

31 October, 2008 at 4:02 pm Quintin 9 comments

My Good Friend Jaco Kroon remarked that my blog was becoming a rant – and since then I have refrained from blogging because I deal with Windows on a daily basis. Hence everytime I open my wordpress admin page a rant is in the making.

Hence, today I will refrain from ranting (I hope) and relate clearly why I think Windows is not a good server OS.

We have two Windows Servers in our Company that are rather mission critical. Our File Server and our Web Server.

The File Server is a Windows 2000 machine chugging bravely along, and our webserver is a Windows 2003 machine. Soon we will be getting a Windows 2008 server – here is hoping my issues with Windows servers has been fixed by now.

Constant Rebooting.
Anyone familiar with Windows will know that it needs to reboot for the smallest reason. Updates are a common reason for needing to reboot. On a mission critical system that means logging into the servers in the dead of night to reboot to “Finish installing important updates.” Security Updates are rather common, and hence your server needs to reboot AT LEAST every second Tuesday of the month – and in between if other patches are issued.
Difficult Maintenance.
As a system practice I have an extra hard-drive (or partition) available that can be used for anything from back-ups to InetPub. Recently our current back-up drive ran out of space and I decided to use a 370gb partition in order to provide a few nights worth of back-up runs until one of us drove out to the Data Centre to insert a new larger drive. I logged in remotely and went ahead to change drive letters between the two drives – essentially swopping them via software. Half way through the re-mapping I realise that I cannot assign the old drive letter to the new partition. You guessed it – I needed to reboot. Twice, in fact – since one reboot releases the old drive letter, and upon assigning the new drive letter you need to reboot again to allow Windows to assign it properly. Why swop drive letters? Well, here comes number 3!
Difficulty with Backups

Windows has a proprietary backup package that comes with the OS, it works well, but it has a few problems – When it runs it often locks the drives, in the case of our file server a scheduled backup locked everyone out of their network shares while the data was being read. In the case of our webserver that would be unacceptable, so we have extra backup software. Add to that our stats, FTP and IIS backup software and you realise that I would need to manually remap five or six backup programs to use the new drive mentioned above, as well as edit our custom cygwin script we use to backup InetPub. And rather than simply running an Rsync to clone the whole machine Windows is finicky as far as folder permissions go – hence the Microsoft Backup program locking data (and running programs) while a backup is running.
Difficulty with Software Updates and Installations.
Updating Windows components is tricky. Just last week we re-installed .net 3.5 in order to get it running (again) and the first thing the installed did was kill the IIS service. Bang, right at the beginning of the installation we could not server web pages. As an emergency measure we killed the installation (via the provided “cancel” button) and suddenly all .net 2.0 reliant pages stopped working. The reason? Somehow all of our hosted pages got reset to running .net 1.0 during the installation. How does a webserver application become the first thing to be killed while installing an update on a webserver? A notification along the lines of “This installation will stop IIS, do you want to continue?” would’ve been dandy.
Shared Platform.
Lets face it – Windows operating systems share a lot of common features accross the server and desktop incarnations. This means that a virus that is spreading in the wild on desktop Windows poses a huge threat to Windows Servers. Now a shared platform is not necessarily a bad thing, the only difference between having an Ubuntu Desktop and an Ubuntu Webserver is litterally “sudo aptitude install lamp” and you have an apache server with MySql and PHP. The problems begin when one of the platforms is known to be a sieve as far as security goes, and the other depends on the same Security mindset.

So there you have it, as non-ranty as I could keep it. I hold firm to the belief that Windows OS should not be allowed anywhere near a server environment – and in listing the above points I purposely steared clear of the common instability and insecurity issues that plague windows.

Oh, and I seriously doubt the uptimes posted for Microsoft servers on some web pages – either they are NEVER maintained and Updated, or Microsoft is flat out lying.

Cheers for now.

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Software, Windows Windows Server

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Written by Jaco Kroon about 4 years ago.

Ok, so that explains what is bad about Windows … I can tell you one or two horror stories about Linux too (Upgrading glibc and kernels remotely is thrawt with pitfalls). So let me ask you this – what would you want from “the perfect” server OS?
Written by Quintin about 4 years ago.

I am sure you can.

On to your question:

The perfect server OS depends largely on the application. Windows does not fit in any scenario I have come across, so that eliminates it.

Linux is a good bet – but the one thing that would be nice to have would be enterprise level support. Red-Hat and Suse offer this – but I would not consider them perfect server OS’es. Binary distributions generally build things in certain ways, and this can be problematic.

I have never used it, but Solaris has one advantage over Linux – never needing to reboot. You can even upgrade the kernel without rebooting. This is a trait that would be handy in any server application – unlimited uptime barring hardware failure. Great for webservers.

The perfect server OS would be able to run through hardware changes, but that would be more than just an OS, it would require a whole system to be designed for continued uptime.

Ad to that stability, security, enterprise level support, access to source code and able to support all current server applications and you would come close.
Written by Juggernaut42 about 4 years ago.

Ok, I love Linux, there is not a OS that I enjoy more. but not to step on any toes. Windows Server 2003 is stable and 2008 is even more stable. There is some server task that I would not choose Windows. example a mail server or a web server or a firewall.

The rest just works. the previous company that I worked for, the majority of the servers was Windows. And they worked brilliantly. The reason why is simple, the guy that maintained the servers knows what he was doing. And the funds for the service department was not cut off.

The Mail Server and VPN Server and Firewall, was all Linux. They have two Terminal Servers, two file servers, two domain controllers, one rad server, one MSSQL server and an ill maintained ISS server(ERP/CRM system,the server was maintained by the developers of the software, which had a bug or two with there software), and the rest was small scale servers that wasn’t mission critical. And they used 3d party backup software.

The most problems that those severs had, was hardware related.

But from the beginning of this year, that knowledgeable guy left the company, And form that day on, the servers are worsening by the day. The people who took his place(yes they splitted his duties for different people) has field knowledge but not server know how.

I must point out that he has more Windows experience than most people I know and that he also uses Linux where it fits best and understands programming a little. And he is twice my age.
Written by soup about 3 years ago.

So far all I have gotten out of your rant is that Windows makes a crappy version of linux. Uninstall Cygwin learn how your tools work then try again. Is there anything more pathetic than some one bashing a way at a nail with a screw driver then complaining about the screw driver?
Written by John Lambo about 3 years ago.

@Juggernaut42

“And he is twice my age.” So.. he’s 84? =3
Written by Quintin about 3 years ago.

Well your point is certainly valid.

Bear in mind though that I really believe that the tools provided with the OS (or by the software vendor for that matter) should be the best tool for administrating said OS.

In this case that does not hold true – and I am frustrated by that.

It is a commentary on the quality of the OS that we needed to install something like Cygwin in order to get reliable backups going.

Believe me, if it were not necessary I would not have used it.
Written by Neil Crow about 3 years ago.

The perfect OS that you described above sounds uncannily like Z/OS on Z-Series.
Preceded by MVS which has been doing hot-hardware changes for decades.
Check IBM’s website.
You can also run linux on the Z-Series, in fact IBM can sell you an (IFL) integrated facility for linux which provides dedicated linux CPU usage so your linux usage does not use any capacity that is designated for Z/OS or DB2.

Also mainframes have been doing virtualisation for decades, I saw a demo a couple of years ago which showed virtual server provisioning at the click of a button on a web-page, and the new server was ready and running in under 1 minute.

I have heard a story about some chap in the states that had to call in IBM when he wanted to reboot, because he received the procedure document from when he joined but they had never rebooted that system in over 10 years, and they weren’t sure that it would all go according to plan.
Now that says a lot about uptime and stability, although it probably says more about following sane maintenance procedures and keeping documentation up to date i.e. re-boot every six months … include this as part of regularly scheduled DR tests.

Finally, I would say use the right tool for the job, I’m very fond of linux, but windows has a place too, even as a server. Specifically windows has a place as a file server, we are experiencing various issues at work currently, where the limited *nix file permission scheme UGO is not flexible enough, and the samba file service just isn’t as stable as native windows also integration with Active Directory is required.
Written by w00t about 3 years ago.

I upgraded a remote server from debian potato (bootfloppies i had) to 4.0 with no probs. I did it in steps just in case- No probs with libc or kernel updates- Maybe the problem somebody has is in the package manager, not the kernel.
Written by Karl about 3 years ago.

“Ok, so that explains what is bad about Windows … I can tell you one or two horror stories about Linux too (Upgrading glibc and kernels remotely is thrawt with pitfalls). So let me ask you this – what would you want from “the perfect” server OS?”
I’d like to see you even THINK about upgrading the Windows kernel remotely. If your server has a remote access card, you can do any of these things easily in Linux. Windows will still require you to be there to put in a CD

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Why Windows is not a good server OS.

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