Windows Server 2012 Now Available on AWS | Hacker News Reader

Windows Server 2012 Now Available on AWS

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69 pointsfriism17 comments

As announced to me this morning by no less than 4 identical emails from their aggressive marketing machine...

On a more serious note, I find windows server 2012 to be pretty unusable remotely thanks to the new UI. The moment you log in via RDP, it goes to hell. The only way out is server core which after login pops up a cmd.exe window.

Not impressed, especially considering as an MS partner, this will pretty much be forced on us soon.

Just dodge around the new UI and it's quite usable. Or better yet get Start8 and automatically skip the new UI on log in altogether (and get a win7 style start menu as a bonus).

Why they would include a tablet oriented touch centric UI in a server product is a matter for another discussion...

Yes. This can certainly be done. It's not ideal but it can be done.

The problem is that this a standard complaint everywhere, and that this is the standard response given everywhere.

In doing everything they could to force Metro down users' throats in Windows 8 (which is a decision I disagree with, but can understand), Microsoft completely failed when repeating that same judgement for a server OS.

Server-admins doing RDP does not want Metro. They have nothing to benefit from metro. They will never use metro. They will not install "apps" on their servers.

This decision has done nothing except harm Microsoft's perception among people who would normally be the proponents of their technology.

I agree there.

Like many in the industry I have a love/hate relationship with Microsoft, as many other companies.

This has to be a decision from the Marketing department on the engineering teams.

I can almost let the decision to have Metro on enterprise desktops slide, considering I use Windows 8 everyday in the enterprise and can almost fully ignore Metro (except for the broken desktop search).

But Metro on Windows Server? It just warps my brain trying to justify that. I cannot think of a single technical reason for it to be there. Except maybe consolidation of shell code, and that's a crappy reason.

> pretty unusable remotely thanks to the new UI

How so? It's much more easy to use with keyboard if yo uhave to do anything there (second question is why would you need to do anything there).

What does 'goes to hell' mean here, specifically?

I regularly remote into a 2012 machine here, and for my uses it works just as with every other machine.

Maybe I'm always ctrl+alt+break'ing into full-screen and you don't, so that my accelerators/shortcuts/whatever are working as expected? Can you provide more details about the pain points you experienced? We're thinking about a bigger 2012 deployment as well and maybe I'm missing flaws that are just outside of what I expect/usually do.

Please share?

Does anyone have any good (read: not micro) benchmarks comparing Server 2012/IIS 8 to Server 2008/IIS 7.5? You'd think it's been available long enough for that, but that does not seem to be the case...

Not exactly what you are looking for, but the bing team posted some perf increases they saw when testing Server 2012 http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsserver/archive/2012/06/07/...

That looks awesome. I wonder if I dare install .Net 4.5 on my work laptop and see if the development cycles are faster as well. I just hate that one little change in a C# file involves a sloooow msbuild plus a sloooow app pool refresh :-( We're taking almost a minute on a speed quad core i7 machine with SSD.

No - if you look in the EULA, there is a clause which stops you publishing benchmarks, which is just wrong on so many levels.

Long ago, I have decided not to recommend a product whose manuals you couldn't see before buying it. It came from a huge disappointment over ATG's Dynamo web platform that led to a cancelled project and some lawyering. If we could have seen all the documentation, we'd have decided against it.

Benchmarking is the same - unless I can see independent benchmarks (ones not authorized or paid for the software maker, done based on publicly available knowledge on the platform) I'm not buying.

It is crummy that you can't read other peoples perf numbers, that being said, evaluation versions exist for a reason. No need to rely on other peoples generic benchmarks.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/hh670538.aspx

Not everyone has the expertise or the time to run their own extensive, comprehensive benchmark suite. It could be dangerous to do so for the uninitiated who may come to the wrong conclusions.

People should however be allowed to make mistakes.

Been waiting for this for two reasons: a) websocket support and b) now the version of IIS that runs under visual studio 2012 and the server matches hopefully avoiding any surprises (v8).

Oh - and provisioning a new server doesn't require 3 hours to apply updates :-)

Regarding updates - yet...

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