What is the advantage of Windows servers?

Question

Microsoft

I increasingly began to see articles slinging mud at Microsoft. Like windows in the enterprise is not needed - you can get by with other products.
What do you think about this, is it possible to do without Microsoft products and what are their advantages?

Answer 1

Active Directory in an enterprise is hard to replace. In my experience, a Linux-enhanced firm still maintains at least one AD controller.
It's simple, relatively fast, but not cheap. As a result, we get simple user authorization and gpo deployment and some other pluses.
In terms of 1C: change the windows terminal server to Linux analogs? Why bother with emulation of a product that is critical for some companies and make problems for yourself?
The rest: dhcp, shaper, dns, file servers work on Linux without any problems (in my case, in conjunction with windows ad)
*More than half of their native country pours mud, but they live here. Willingly or not is another matter.

Answer 2

First, I don't know any sane replacements for Active Directory. If you have only a few computers on Windows on your network, you can get by with a server with Samba, if there are more and if you really need to distribute rights between users, you already need AD, if there are more than ten computers, then it is simply necessary not only for shared resources, but also for mass installation of programs, for example.
Secondly, MS SQL Server is a very good DBMS. Almost the only enterprise-class DBMS (in terms of reliability, performance and functionality) to work with which there is no need to be seven spans in the forehead as a sectarian specialist with tons of smoked manuals and certificates behind him (although Oracle may not be as scary as it is painted , didn't really try to figure it out).
Thirdly, C# is a very good language, in comparison with the backward verbose Java (which, in fact, is its prototype, C# is, roughly speaking, a greatly improved Java) and even more so with PHP "day and night", as it seems to me (I’m telling you this as a person who is relatively unbiased and has tried to write in all this and not only, I personally liked Scala the most, but it has its drawbacks (primarily of an ecosystem nature, there are no complaints about the language)), and hosting any serious ASP.Net sites on Linux+Mono are hardly a very good idea.
Fourth, Windows RDP seems to be the best solution for remote work: VNC is slow and not very functional (when I last looked it couldn’t forward printers and disks, for example), Citrix cost some absolutely cosmonautical money, others are little known and too specific.
Fifthly, there is still such a good thing (and which did not have any sufficiently sane competitors a few years ago) like Share Point.
IMHO.

Answer 3

All the advantages of Win servers are a direct consequence of their shortcomings.
Taking a win server, we get the whole stack: server, IIS, ms sql, .net, exchange, active directory... there can be listed for a long time. Moreover, all this is integrated into each other and, at least at the grassroots level, sparks really work. It's called "vendor lock-in" :)
All this is administered in a quite clear way, IIS or MS SQL can be configured not by a special administrator with ten years of experience, but by an ordinary programmer. It's called "stupid GUI with buttons".
And so on for all points.

Answer 4

indispensable). Linux here is always catching up in any area. except maybe web servers and specific routing products. soft-bodied ones set the wave ... and everyone else .. scurrying .. with mats .. configs ... trying to repeat it)

Answer 5

Of course you can get by. Moreover, many companies manage very, very successfully, current trends are such that they are trying to get off Windows, in Germany, for example, and open source software is being actively introduced in our schools. There are no special advantages for Windows servers, but it all depends on the project. Linux servers are simply easier to administer, and the job market is filled with system administrators who have experience in setting up and maintaining Unix-like servers. And if any critical holes are found, updates are immediately released. But this does not exclude the possibility that Microsoft technologies can be used on large projects, and very successfully. An example is StackOverflow. You see, the question is holistic and much depends on the company itself, and on the product that it sells, and even on the preferences of system administrators.

Answer 6

What is the advantage of Windows servers? Nothing.
The need for it is provided by the presence
of 1 Specific software (.ASP, 1C, MSSQL, etc.)
2 The need for centralized control of win desktops (AD, GPO)
In the absence of the above tasks, there is no need to use win servers There
are roles where the presence of a win server is inappropriate
1 Routing and other near-network solutions (proxy, etc.)
2 Frontend mail, dns and web servers - if ms solutions work well for an intranet, they are poorly adapted to work on the public Internet and have a huge number of features
. In general, these features appeared due to a special understanding and interpretation of standards by Microsoft ( as well as the vendor lock policy)

Answer 7

Small corporate mail server without problems.
In my organization, I deployed a mail server on a Windows server 2012 in a Hyper-V environment.
As a mail server used hMailServer, simple and clear as three rubles.
No command line, the documentation is in Russian.
Integration with Active Directory without a tambourine. For integration, it is enough to register the server itself in AD, and that's it.
Accounts are taken from AD. Blocked the user in AD, closed access to mail.
Installed on IIS - Roundcube, for web access to mail.
It took less than half a work week.
RAM consumes no more than 1 GB for 30 mailboxes. Linux would require at least 2-3 GB.
Consumes one license for Windows Server 2012