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Microsoft are now moving quickly to allow users to run .NET on all platforms. How long until they decide that Windows Server is no longer worth investing in? O

• pjmlp 11y ago
  As an hybrid kernel, able to do asynchronous IO better than open source UNIX clones, adoption of C++ instead of bare bones unsafe C and an OOP ABI (COM), I look forward to the existence of Windows as server OS. There are lots of MS only shops out there and I don't see any of the changing in the near future.
  • ploxiln 11y ago
    "C++ instead of bare bones unsafe C" is C++ really much safer than C? "an OOP ABI (COM)" you really think this sort of thing is super great and there's nothing like it on "UNIX clones"? I have heard interesting things about windows async i/o syscalls, but as you'll see in another sub-thread, IIS still has a major component in the kernel, because the overall syscall overhead of windows is apparently somewhat high. This wouldn't be the first time I've heard of super-fancy windows subsystem designs which in practice were sabotaged by just generally over-complicated implementations. I recall a blog post by Mark Russinovich around the time Vista came out about the new, quite advanced file copying algorithms: http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2008/02/04/2826167.aspx http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2008/02/0... - but that file copying performance was often significantly reduced when playing an mp3 file due to the "multimedia class scheduler" - http://superuser.com/questions/18600/107mb-s-network-file-copying-slowed-to-16-5mb-s-playing-local-media-files-w http://superuser.com/questions/18600/107mb-s-network-file-co... - either because i/o and execution priorities didn't actually work, or the engineer assigned to do this didn't know what he was doing and neither did anyone he worked with. Who knows? This sort of thing is all over microsoft's stuff. Theoretically super advanced, in practice just over-complicated. It's closed source and hugely complicated, so we'll never really know why it doesn't work as well as it should.
    • pjmlp 11y ago
      > "C++ instead of bare bones unsafe C" is C++ really much safer than C? If one codes as "C with C++ compiler" then no. If one makes use of the features that fix C unsafety, then yes. > "an OOP ABI (COM)" you really think this sort of thing is super great and there's nothing like it on "UNIX clones"? Which UNIX clone provides a standard OO ABI, as well as, a shell close to the Xerox PARC user experience? Taligent failed.
  • osullivj 11y ago
    When I first saw a whole stack of low latency C++ Win32 based servers running on Windows supporting an interest rate trading business back in 2004 I was amazed. Talarian SmartSockets was used for interprocess pub/sub between servers. There was no COM. No thread pools, just a handful of threads in each process executing distinct code. Very clean async design. Back then Linux didn't have lightweight threads, IIRC. I think this is the kind of thing Windows Nano might support. Is that what you had in mind when you look forward to Windows as a server OS?
    • pjmlp 11y ago
      Windows IO completion ports and the way threads are scheduled are probably only beaten by Solaris and Aix specific APIs. Most FOSS devs never care to learn such APIs and stay with the lowest common denominator that happens to exist in GNU/Linux and *BSD.
      • anon4 11y ago
        Do you think this will change with the popularity of node.js and libuv? That is, people using said capabilities in a cross-platform manner more.
        • pjmlp 11y ago
          I doubt it. On the enterprise space from our customers, no one cares about them. It is all about .NET, C++ and additionally the JVM when going outside Windows.
      • trentnelson 11y ago
        > are probably only beaten by Solaris and Aix specific APIs. They're definitely not. AIX copied the IOCP interface almost verbatim, but missed one critical piece: associating an IOCP with a desired concurrency level. Solaris added event ports, but again, they missed the concurrency link too. The root of the problem on UNIX is the readiness I/O model. See https://speakerdeck.com/trent/pyparallel-how-we-removed-the-gil-and-exploited-all-cores?slide=47 https://speakerdeck.com/trent/pyparallel-how-we-removed-the-... for more info.
  • gillianseed 11y ago
    >As an hybrid kernel I must ask, what exactly makes the current NT kernel a 'hybrid' kernel ?
    • pjmlp 11y ago
      It still makes use of the original micro-kernel design,with kernel level RPC to separate modules. Thus still offering a micro-kernel cleanness in a monolithic space. Also since Windows Vista many drivers are now implemented in user space, with minimal kernel primitives.
      • nickpsecurity 11y ago
        Exactly. It gets the modularity and some fault isolation without the vastly-reduced attack surface of kernel mode. ;)
      • gillianseed 11y ago
        >with kernel level RPC to separate modules. Is this what is described as LPC ? Could you elaborate on how it separates the modules (as opposed to unix subsystems) ? >Thus still offering a micro-kernel cleanness in a monolithic space. What does this 'cleanness' provide, and how ? It's all in kernel space so if one module crashes the whole kernel crashes ?
        • pjmlp 11y ago
          First of all, yes memory corruption will still bring the whole thing down. Only pure micro-kernels can survive it. What Windows does, is that there aren't any direct calls between modules, only kernel level RPC calls. All parameters are packed into the RPC message, it is dispatched, unpacked, validated as much as possible on the receiving end, then processed. Messages and its validation introduce an indirection layer that improves safety. It is based on the original micro-kernel design Windows NT had, before they moved graphics back into the kernel. So the micro-kernel message passing is still there, but simplified since now everything runs on the same space. But as of Windows Vista, UDF was introduced for user space drivers. The "Inside Windows" book series go into great detail how everything works.
• signal11 11y ago
  imho, if Active Directory/ADAM ran on Linux demand for Windows Server would drop considerably. However Windows Server is also used to deliver Citrix-style remote desktops (using App Virtualization[1]) and that would be harder to replace. Also, SQL Server and Exchange use plenty of Windows-specific OS features -- it wouldn't be impossible to port to Linux but it would be a lot of work. [1] https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/hh397409.aspx https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/hh397409.aspx
  • merb 11y ago
    Actually Active Directory already ran on Linux. Samba4 has support for AD up to 2008 R2. Currently I don't think ADAM is builtin yet, but SAMBA4 is already in a good state, however it still misses a good GUI, (you need a MS OS to configure some stuff, like GPO)
  • zamalek 11y ago
    Add Sharepoint (Microsoft's true cash cow[1]) to that list of yours and, yep, Windows definitely isn't going away. [1]: http://www.tannerhelland.com/4993/microsoft-money-updated-2013/ http://www.tannerhelland.com/4993/microsoft-money-updated-20...
    • buffoon 11y ago
      AD, Sharepoint, Office 365 is already canned in Azure/O365. You won't be buying a Windows Server license to run them any more and it's feasible that they may even not run on Windows at some point in the future. Office's server portion and Sharepoint is all .Net so expect them to move it to ASP.Net 5 at some point.
      • frik 11y ago
        SharePoint is a cash cow, but its implementation is such an old mess with lots of parts stayed unchanged since v2003. Nowadays Microsoft India is mainly working on it. The most polished version was v2007, since then little has changed. SharePoint is basically the server part of Office. It's a web CMS, a web based Office (viewer), with AD account login support. I wonder why there is no open source SharePoint alternative e.g. coded in PHP.
• tonyedgecombe 11y ago
  If you look at recent financial statements from Microsoft their server revenue is still growing at a reasonable rate.
• buffoon 11y ago
  Heavy Windows server user here. We have 100+ windows server 2008 R2 and 2012 R2 machines in production and a massive .Net/C# codebase. Currently it's a complete bastard of an operating system. It's expensive, hard to manage even with powershell and DSC etc, difficult to update, difficult to provision, complicated and to be honest absolutely terrible licensing hell that costs us days a year. Hyper-V just adds complexity before anyone suggests that. Exchange on-site deployments are dead. Everyone is moving away from them now and into Office 365 and Google Apps. There is no rational cost justification to use anything else now. Even the big orgs (5000+ staff) are moving off it as it's cheaper to get a fat pipe in than it is to keep 2-3 windows admins and a pile of kit and a SAN on the payroll just to run groupware. Biztalk is also dead and has been for a few years. People who were using it heavily seem to be holding onto it due to cost reasons and everyone else who has been using it and have done any platform re-engineering have moved off to Windows Server AppFabric, NServiceBus and custom integrations or to AWS/SQS. Microsoft are pushing Windows Server 2016 with container support as the up and coming new thing. I'm really not interested in this myself. I don't think anyone else is either other than a select number of core windows bloggers. It's simply a "me too" move. As we re-engineer our application, what our endgame currently looks like is deploying disposable Linux VMs (CentOS) on AWS running ASP.Net 5/golang, microservices, lots of small PostgreSQL nodes (RDS) rather than massive 48 core SQL Server boxes, using OAuth2/OpenID authentication and getting rid of our extensive operations team who are incidentally more of an obstruction than an aid to the organisation. IMHO Windows Server is probably circling the drain. There are very few places it fits in a modern business and this is only going to get worse going forth as well. The remaining killer is Active Directory but you can already get Microsoft to deal with that for you on Azure, pre-integrated with Office 365 and sharepoint etc. Microsoft I suspect will end up a services company like Google with some hardware being sold on the side. And you know what? That's fine.
  • frik 11y ago
    The plan for the original Active Directory was to be the directory service of a Microsoft dominated "information highway" called "The Microsoft Network" (v1). see the infamous Microsoft memo from Bill Gates It seems they have big plans for their cloud product "Azure"
• rottyguy 11y ago
  I'm currently in my first nix job after years with Windows. It's a larger company (15k+ people) and using RedHat for it's linux solution (solaris/aix is also present). Honestly, I don't understand the $$$ argument at the enterprise level against msoft. Not only are you paying Redhat for support but their RPMs are about a year behind what's out there (that's a lot of time!). I'm trying to get .net (coreclr) compiled now on RHEL to play around but having a heck of a time b/c of all the old packages (btw- if anyone has instructions for this, __PLEASE__ send along). Are other nix shops using Ubuntu for their servers?
  • merb 11y ago
    Lot's of Shops use Ubuntu, yes. However you could also use CentOS or Fedora to be more flexible then with RedHat, especially when it comes to costs. 'Mostly' you don't need the Enterprise support, however without any paying for it we won't have Fedora / CentOS in the future. ;)
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  • rwmj 11y ago
    If you're comparing Red Hat RPM's version numbers, then don't. Red Hat works by backporting features and fixes on top of the old versions, precisely so customers don't need to upgrade to new major versions so often.
    • rottyguy 11y ago
      Well that makes it more complicated. Any idea how I would be able to find these packages (specifically: libunwind8, libssl-dev and unzip) https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/master/Documentation/install/get-dotnetcore-dnx-linux.md https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/master/Documentation/...
      • th0br0 11y ago
        Uhm, ... packages don't always have the same names on all distributions! i.e. "libunwind8" translates to libunwind, unzip to unzip and libssl-dev to openssl-devel. libunwind's from EPEL though...
• Kurtz79 11y ago
  "How long until they decide that Windows Server is no longer worth investing in ?" Without hard data to support it, my impression (or better, my anecdotal experience) is that Windows Server has quite a strong hold in medium/large sized companies (not necessarily IT companies) as part of the local network infrastructure, and it's quite profitable for Microsoft.
  • buffoon 11y ago
    I think it's treated as a necessary evil. People are starting to realise that it's less necessary these days. Anecdotally, back a decade ago it was common to see a Windows 2000/2003/SBS box in even an SME environment being a fileserver/exchange/intranet/AD box. Now, I rarely see one. In fact they're declining even in large corps.
    • frik 11y ago
      What do you use as replacement for Active Directory? Which OS do you deploy on thin clients (ChromeOS, Android, Ubuntu/RedHat Linux)?
      • buffoon 11y ago
        AD replacement: oauth2 backed by a directory server (Azure AD / Google apps accounts) Clients: anything really. The OS almost doesn't matter now.