Windows Server 2016 or 2019?
- Thread starter Larson
- Start date
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I ran into some NIC performance issues with my Xeon D systems with onboard Intel 10Gbps NICs.
The workarounds in Server 2019 network performance were helpful for me, FYI.
The workarounds in Server 2019 network performance were helpful for me, FYI.
I am running a bunch of WS2019 servers with Hyper-V since 01/2019. The first few months were a nightmare! In two servers, I experienced a lot of issues with Adaptec 7Q-series RAID cards. While the OS has drivers for these cards, they unstable and I/O on RAID volumes just hangs. The OS works, but any process touching a volume hosted on that Adaptec card just hangs indefinitely. The only cure was upgrading to 8-series Adaptec. Could go for the newest Microsemi SmartRAID cards, as they are not compatible with the older RAID layout used by 7 and 8-series cards. I kept experiencing issues in the form of I/O delays (such as 40-second running Hyper-V IO operations), but the servers stopped hanging.
I was lucky to get in touch with a file system developer in Redmond and submit tons of memory dumps and kernel traces. I have no idea what they did with that, but yes, over time with each monthly update, the situation got better and more stable.
In the third server, running Storage Spaces and ReFS with deduplication, I also had issues every couple weeks with the system freezing and requiring a hard reboot. The troublemaker was an Ubuntu VM running under Hyper-V. I have no idea what was the real root cause of the problem. Just got rid of that VM and the system has been stable ever since.
So, today, YES, I'd go with WS2019 for production use. However, I'd avoid: (A) older hardware, anything like 4+ years old, (B) Linux VMs, unless I were a Linux + Hyper-V expert, which I am not.
I was lucky to get in touch with a file system developer in Redmond and submit tons of memory dumps and kernel traces. I have no idea what they did with that, but yes, over time with each monthly update, the situation got better and more stable.
In the third server, running Storage Spaces and ReFS with deduplication, I also had issues every couple weeks with the system freezing and requiring a hard reboot. The troublemaker was an Ubuntu VM running under Hyper-V. I have no idea what was the real root cause of the problem. Just got rid of that VM and the system has been stable ever since.
So, today, YES, I'd go with WS2019 for production use. However, I'd avoid: (A) older hardware, anything like 4+ years old, (B) Linux VMs, unless I were a Linux + Hyper-V expert, which I am not.
FWIW:
- I had 2 systems with Adaptec cards. Lots of trouble. I purged all Adaptec cards from my systems. I've had fantastic/solid storage from 3ware (EOL) and the Intel rebadged LSI cards (Intel RSP* / LSI 9480-8i8e, etc).
- I have lots of VMs on Debian, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, etc., no issues.
<rant>
I detest adapted cards, and by extension HP dumbarray. Compaq's raid cards and storage guys were awesome, first DEC killed the MSA, then HP and Hurd trashed the SmartArray to where it is garbage. There is no future for hardware raid: NVME makes any card between storage and CPU a bottleneck.
</rant>
I detest adapted cards, and by extension HP dumbarray. Compaq's raid cards and storage guys were awesome, first DEC killed the MSA, then HP and Hurd trashed the SmartArray to where it is garbage. There is no future for hardware raid: NVME makes any card between storage and CPU a bottleneck.
</rant>
What do you mean? Patching in 2016 only takes like 10 times longer than any other Windows Server OS.