Windows Server 2016 or 2019?

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Larson

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Nov 10, 2015
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Hello everyone,

Have anybody dug into Windows Server 2019 yet? Is it ready to take the place of 2016 in a production environment? Has it fixed anything in 2016? Just looking for thoughts.

Thanks,
James
 

Larson

Member
Nov 10, 2015
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Thanks Steven for your input. Do you know if it still has the Essentials Role available like 2016?
 

vanfront

Member
Jun 5, 2020
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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.
 
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j_h_o

Active Member
Apr 21, 2015
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California, US
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.
 
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edge

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Apr 22, 2013
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<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>
 
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Evan

Well-Known Member
Jan 6, 2016
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I wouldn’t use anything but 2019 today so long as your application supports it.
 
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SteveS

New Member
Dec 10, 2015
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<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>
This is very true.