Server 2012 r2 and Exchange 2013

[anything I don't mind]

Good or bad? *WARNING RANT BELOW*

My initial impression is that it is the worse piece of software that i have ever seen. I have it installed on a 2012 r2 which is terrible in its own right. But 2013, its like they went out of their way to make everything worse. I dare touch DAG as i imagine that to be even worse than it was in 2010 and that says a lot as 2010 DAG was poorly designed to the say the least.

Moving public folders required days of work and loads of scripts and would have been impossible if it was not for some poor expert on the internet who had made a blog explaining what to do.

Then the ECP, where to begin UHH. The design is terrible, this flat white with these ugly fonts, there is no structure to it, you can't get any information that you need without going in to these ugly popup windows. The fonts, oh wait i moaned about the fonts already, but WHY?

Then features, mailbox moves now need to be named? yea that makes sense and now with 20 extra clicks. Then we have the ECP which keeps failing with

Server Error in '/ecp' Application.

Apparently a common problem, *sigh*

Then server 2012? oh no, they didn't just make a full screen start menu on a server OS? why? Did they even test this in terminal services, did they even see how slow a full screen start menu is on terminal services before they rolled it out on a server OS? I hope they didn't test it because if they did test it and rolled it out anyway they are worse than i thought.

They took everything annoying about server 2008 and did nothing with it, they then took everything that worked and made it as annoying as they could and then they added a whole new load of annoyances.

Things that needed some work like the MSC snapins, did nothing with it, things that worked fine, server manager, they redesigned it so that it was more annoying than they could possibly make it. Did i mention the fonts? the flatness is just disgusting and yep they added an annoying action center flag to not only the server manager but the ECP. Yep, every time you do anything on the ecp you get a notification on the action center flag that you just did what you just did. Brilliant.

I only just started using it so i am sure i will fine more annoyances.

What do i like it about.... not seen any improvements yet. Maybe someone can point out what they have improved or what is now easier? i would be happy to hear it?

 

[anything I don't mind]

I realy liked the 2008 server manager from the first time i used it, it was way better than 2003 in my opinion and that is why i liked it. So i am not just hating stuff because its new.

Initially i thought 2010 admin console was a step backwards and in some ways it was, but i never hated it as much as this 2013. The 2013 design makes me want to vomit, i think its all that white and ugly fonts and constant refreshing. So we both agree that 2013 ecp is rubbish. The only positive i can think of with the ecp is that the ugly design is going to force me to use the shell for basic tasks.


What are some things you like about the 2012 r2 and were you a fan of windows 8 as well? I am just looking for reasons to like it at this point rather than to try and disagree with you about it.

 

[anything I don't mind]

Powershell is annoying. Most of the very useful features require additional addon packs and you can't just guess those, you have to look them up. It also require some extensive coding for a shell to be able to do basic functions. The command reference is quite lazy in my opinion. You can tell it is made by microsoft. Should be called the powerless shell by microsoft trademark.

Even then the amount of times i have had to connect directly to a server to solve a problem because the RDP services decided throw a wobbly. In ideal world i would be sitting on a beach somewhere with a tablet using teh fullscreen start menu to monitor and manage my servers. In reality i am in a dirty server room with a keyboard in my hand and a monitor balancing on chair in some cases. The people that design windows server 2012, do not actually use windows server. They used it in testing but i bet most of them never realy use it.

 

[anything I don't mind]

Would not call a 100 user multi million £ company insignificant enough to ignore. There are only 500 fortune 500 companies. is that right? there are millions of SME. Automation is not what I am against anyway. It is lazy development and poor design choices. Powershell could be so much better, MSC span ins could be so much better. Everything MS develops could be so much better, it is just their focus is wrong. They were so busy trying to push touch interfaces and continuity across operating systems (and the cloud lol) that they forgot about the desktop and server market.

I won't be upgrading to 2012 any time soon and will recommend to see what the next version has in store. MS have a unique position in the market where they have a monopoly on the server OS in enterprise, generally. There are not many enterprise willing to try anything else. So MS are in that position development wise where the users will be upgrading whether they like it or not and thus there is not the same economic incentive that you would find if they were just trying to develop the software and sell it. They don't have to supply support in the same way for their services as some application that you buy. No one gets support with exchange out the box. Try and imagine some third party enterprise mail system not supplying support. Wouldn't happen. This is why MS development is so poor. 2012 has no real improvements just cosmetic and some minor features here and then. We have to weary of them just milking that position and offering sub standard versions just to make more money.

 

[anything I don't mind]

By Fortune 500 I meant it as shorthand for 'companies of that size', of which there are many thousands if you include UK, Europe, and worldwide equivalents plus public bodies of similar size. Microsoft might care about SMEs to the point where they will take your license money and support you, but SMEs do not drive the conversation and the future of MS server products in the way big companies do.



Completely false. If you look at web servers, Microsoft actually have a minority position with about 30% of websites hosted on IIS. Most of the rest are on Apache or Nginx which are almost always hosted on Linux. SQL Server only has about 15% of the market whereas Oracle DB (most likely on Solaris) and IBM DB2 (AS400 or AIX) both have over 30%. Exchange or O365 still only host about 50% of mailboxes in the enterprise. AD is the market leader (in large part due to the ubiquity of Windows desktops) and it's presence is pretty much a given but Microsoft simply do not dominate the server market like they do with desktops OSs. Sources:

Web servers: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2014/02/03/february-2014-web-server-survey.html
Databases: http://databases.about.com/library/weekly/aa060401a.htm
Email: http://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-conte...rket-Analysis-2013-2017-Executive-Summary.pdf

I am not wrong, MS do have a monopoly on the server market. I didn't say web server or databases. I am just referring to servers in general. What is the competition linux? i bet there is a very small percentage of linux based servers in use in enterprise compared to windows and if you exclude webservers and databases then non windows servers is going to be even smaller of a percentage.

What mail servers are they competing against?

Most web servers are hosted in datacenters where non windows servers are more prevalent. Within enterprise server rooms non windows is still a small percentage. Some legacy systems and some finance systems utilise non windows servers probably the most. Most enterprises however are strictly windows only, well from my experience.

I don't see how breaking the server manager making and making a fullscreen start menu and not improving other basic things on windows server is some how shunning the SME in favour of the enterprise. Please again explain to me how they are favouring enterprise? To me it just sounds like an excuse for rubbish development and design choices. You should try get a job at MS probably fit right in.

 

[anything I don't mind]

Yes you are wrong. You can't make general assumptions based on your own very limited experience. I've worked with dozens of large customers and Windows is about as prevalent as the statistics in those articles suggests. You can't 'exclude' web servers and database servers since they represent probably 75% of all servers within a typical customer's environment, since most apps these days are web apps driven by databases. Even 'general' servers (whatever the hell that is supposed to mean) are likely to include things like fileservers which again are unlikely to be on Windows Server - ZFS (Solaris), NetApp and the like will dominate that. Likewise VMWare has around 60% of the market for virtualisation.

In fact, according to Forbes Microsoft has just 45% of the server market: http://www.forbes.com/sites/rajsabh...inux-deals-the-latest-blow-to-redmond-empire/ This percentage would be much lower if it wasn't for AD.

You simply don't know what you're talking about, and trying to paint me as some sort of Microsoft fanboy is pretty pathetic - and stupid, given my current employer.



It's very simple - the Windows GUI is very low priority for the Windows Server team because their most important customers will not use it. The bigger customers will rely on System Center to deploy pre-built server images and then use PowerShell and remote tools that are built on top of PowerShell to manage them. Only small customers will spend a significant amount of time RDPing onto boxes to do any form of management, because it simply isn't efficient to do management this way in any sort of medium to large scale environment. For example, I've worked with customers who had many thousands of domain controllers - managing them via RDP would be impossible.

I have already said that i don't see that as an argument against what i am saying. I don't see how breaking the server manager and adding a full screen start menu helps large enterprises. Even if you run RSAT you still connect with the same msc client gui. Those improvements to scalability came with 2008 not 2012. When powershell was introduced they tried to improve on command line functionality. What they did at the same time was neglect gui development, sure they did it because they want to focus on large enterprise with 1000 domain controller. I don't see how that makes them any better developers, in some ways that makes them even worse because not only are they focusing on touch screens and "the cloud" (ie their saas) they are also neglecting their SME customers. Thanks for pointing that out, i never thought of it that way. Either way we stuck with them in a lot of regards, in most of the companies that i have worked for ranging form 100-1500 employees they generally run window servers only.