To “CORE” or not to “CORE

I’d like to know how many of you there are actually using the 2008 core flavour?

Reason I ask is that I have been (and still am but a bit more in the closet now) a big fan of the Core flavour in Windows 2008. It’s lean, it’s mean and it will silence some of those rabiate anti-gui groups We put 2 roles on it being DNS and ADDS, CCC it a bit and done. But then the trouble starts. I mean management of those boxes is a nightmare over WAN links whatever tools you’re using. Try it with the built-in MMC tools or WINRS… Try and troubleshoot a hardware failure on of them… Patching should be less frequent? Don’t think so. Collegue of mine calculated that for every 3 Windows 2008 FULL patches there’s only 1 for Windows 2008 CORE on average, but that still implies patching it once a month So I was convinced by my collegues that CORE doesn’t fit our scheme. Well it does when there’s reliable and performant network pipes so our major data centers with mail systems and provisioning systems eating away at our directory machines would profit from it. But then our benchmarking testing did not really show us any significant performance gain comparing Full and CORE.

Any views/comments/ideas?

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