Have you noticed the Windows Server market shrinking?
Posted by awesome_pinay_noses@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 113 comments
Hi all,
Firstly, I would like to say that I am not a sysadmin but a network engineer. I am currently working in a new company for the last 2 years now and the strategy is cloud-first. This means minimal on-prem footprint and if anything can be SaaS, it will be SaaS.
This got me thinking, with all the containerized platforms, Kubernetes clusters and cloud Identity providers, is the Windows Server market shrinking? I have seen a significant reduction on Windows Server VMs in our estate.
Brave-Math2772@reddit
I see the same, allot of K8's and microservices on hyperscalers. On prem Windows Servers are slowly dying together with the legacy software it is running.
To be honest at first i was thinking this can't be good but if you look at it in retrospective you didn't get allot of service from Microsoft, it was verry expensive and it was not resource efficient.
Next step for us is moving the on prem away from VMWare to Proxmox.
Escanut@reddit
Haven't used Proxmox before, how much better is it than standard VMWare.
m0rd0rian@reddit
It is a bit better (having zfs is nice) and it wouldnt be enough for established business to move to. But VMWare was acquired by Broadcom...
uebersoldat@reddit
I can't afford to move a business worth tens of millions to a worse-performing platform just because 'Broadcom'. We're sticking with them unfortunately until something technically better exists.
OverOnTheRock@reddit
But what does 'technically better' mean? Are you talking about the core hypervisor capability (with ProxMox/KVM being rock solid), or are you talking about the availability of the support tools that surround the basic hypervisor?
uebersoldat@reddit
I can't afford to be slower, which is what I'm reading in certain scenarios. I admit I have not tested it. Going by reddit feedback and such.
USarpe@reddit
The Problem is, compare to HyperV Proxmox was very slow, special on a SQL-Based Application, the Feedback I got was some bullshit like try to switch everything, so I went back.
fearless-fossa@reddit
This is bullshit and you know it. For Windows machines Hyper-V is slightly ahead of Proxmox, and for Linux machines the reverse is true. Neither speed difference are in the area where they're critical.
In 9/10 cases a MS SQL server running on Linux with Proxmox as a hypervisor will be faster than running on Windows with Hyper-V.
USarpe@reddit
Tell that the Application, not me, Crystal Report needed 3 Minutes for Printer selection. I does not help, that it could have possibly be faster, the customer stuck there, he is selling juwelery and by the actual gold price he needed to print new prices nearly daily for hundrets of article. But even with payed subscription I stuck with a problem, I never saw in decades I HyperV.
spamyak@reddit
If you migrated an existing VM, there could have been a few problems. Was the block size aligned between the host and guest filesystems? Was the CPU architecture set to match the host? Did you do any testing to see if you were getting hung up on compute, I/O, or memory?
USarpe@reddit
it was a brandnew very fast system and installation and the CPU was set to host.
I tryed a lot of settings, but already "try setting and test" has no room in a professional enviroment. Production is no playground.
GG_Killer@reddit
That's hardware and configuration based, not software based in my experience. I run two database VMs without any issues but my traffic isn't crazy large. 10+ LXCs and about 10 VMs running on the same host.
jwalker107@reddit
It depends on how you look at it.
In terms of overall features, I'd say it's slightly behind.
In terms of manageability and documentation, I'd say it's quite a bit behind. And I love the product.
In terms of price-per-feature, it's about ...infinity better.
admlshake@reddit
Depends on how heavily you use the other features of vmware. If you just need a host to run VM's on, then it works great. On the other hand if you need DRS and all the other features, it's not gonna do so hot. Their DCM appliance is....okay, but it needs a LOT of work before it's gonna be ready for the big companies.
Brandhor@reddit
one thing that is better compared to vmware is that you can do software raid and in particular you can use zfs and enable filesystem compression to save some space
on the other hand zfs is a memory hog so you have to "waste" some ram to use it
gsmitheidw1@reddit
VSAN is one of the few things I miss. Sure Proxmox has CePH but it's a lot more involved to get up and running and needs a lot more prerequisite knowledge.
Fabl0s@reddit
50% arc cache is just a dumb default, you can tune it down a lot anyway, that dumb 1GB mem per 1TB storage was an already bad semantic that came up years ago from zfs dedup discussion and somehow stuck with people.
megoyatu@reddit
Not better, but definitely good enough to switch so you can tell Broadcom to pound sand.
Our large University is currently migrating.
NightOfTheLivingHam@reddit
I wouldnt say its better, but it's more compliant with 99% of cloud computing systems that run KVM and use containers (proxmox uses LXC which was the basis for docker.) and if proxmox died tomorrow, you could bring your stuff to another platform far easier as it uses open standards.
I tried XCP-Ng but found it lacking long term
AnomalyNexus@reddit
What were your concerns about XCP-ng? Never used it myself but curious about it
exedore6@reddit
As someone who's used Xenserver and went to xcp-ng, I'm also curious here. The biggest issue I've run into are vendor-provided VMs that are 'Vmware or Hyper-V only', especially when run alongside Xen-Orchestra.
DheeradjS@reddit
It is not, technically.
But it's not Broadcom, so it's infinitely better.
Brave-Math2772@reddit
Wouldn't say it's better, it just does what it needs to do, especially if you look at the pricing compared to VMWare.
In all honesty if pricing wasn't an issue and if Broadcom didn't completely ruin the company we would've stayed with VMWare.
Fabl0s@reddit
Wouldn't say better really, saves a lot of money while getting the Job done well enough.
But less strict on requirements, and you can make changes to the system on your own too, you can come up with way more flexible setups since its just Linux.
Absolute_Bob@reddit
It's not, but it also doesn't have a giant monolithic organization actively shitting all over their customers either. Anyone who can should move away from Broadcom as quick as they can.
PanicAdmin@reddit
I understand why you want to move away from VMWare and less from ProxMox, but what are the real alternatives? Citrix? Syneto?
Top-Perspective-4069@reddit
Depending what you need, your three major options are always going to be Hyper-V, Nutanix, and Scale.
If you have a lot of Linux experience in your org, then you can start looking into more options but support for a lot of those can be spotty.
dagbrown@reddit
sUpPoRt fOr a lOt oF tHoSe cAn bE sPotTy
Because lord knows, Big Blue is a clearly a Johnny-come-lately company when it comes to both support for huge enterprises and virtualization, right?
JewishTomCruise@reddit
Doesn't seem like you know what company Big Blue is.
dagbrown@reddit
You do know that they support both OpenShift and a virtualization technology so ancient that it's simply called "VM", right?
JewishTomCruise@reddit
None of which are Hyper-, Nutanix, or Scale
Practical-Alarm1763@reddit
What in the AS400emulator are you talking about?
Runnergeek@reddit
OpenShift
Erok2112@reddit
If you havent, you might also look into XCP-NG which is the open source version of Citrix Xenserver. Super solid and very scalable. If you have approvals to go forward with Proxmox then by all means go for it and I'm sure it will work well for you. XCP-NG aligns more with VmWare+VSphere and does have paid support if required.
fearless-fossa@reddit
Even outside of cloud services Windows Servers are dying and being replaced by Linux servers. So many companies used Windows as a host for stuff like Wildfly - this is all being migrated to Linux, even without containerization. Many of the tools that used to be popular among Windows admins like NSSM haven't seen updates in years.
scungilibastid@reddit
I am support engineer for a security integrator. On prem is alive and well here as far as surveillance and access control software goes. There are cloud solutions...however they are extremely expensive and run the risk of locking out all of your hardware if subscription is unpaid. Alot of this stuff is still dependent on .NET Framework 4.8
Public_Fucking_Media@reddit
Moving to Azure and the cloud rather than shrinking IMO.
FatBook-Air@reddit
My org isn't necessarily "cloud first," but we still have migrated a lot from Windows Server to RHEL and Rocky Linux. Our reasons:
BelugaBilliam@reddit
What are you pivoting to from AD? I would imagine that's the only strong suit for a lot of orgs
GullibleDetective@reddit
Not really. It's only the aws and azure servers online that made any real difference and even then not much for smb space
throwaway0000012132@reddit
It's shrinking, but not dying. There are some products that work better and are more efficient and less expensive than to run on the cloud (try running a huge SQL cluster on the cloud and you will basically paying an absurd amount of money for less performance and security).
There's also some applications that runs better on Windows or are Microsoft great assets, like Active Directory.
But the world is evolving and more products are moving to containers and/or Linux, doesn't necessarily mean it's better, specially if you buy their enterprise support only to find out it's a clown supported product that closes tickets even when it should support you.
Also cloud can be a very tricky topic: many EU enterprises can't be cloud first because of data sovereignty; security is also a hot topic and not least compliance and governance are more demanding then ever.
kn33@reddit
I agree for the most part. If nothing else, Active Directory will be a holdout for a lot of companies for a long time. That being said, at some point the endpoints will all be Azure AD and Intune. If there's no endpoints, that just leaves the other Windows servers that need to be serviced by AD/GPO. If there are no other Windows servers, then what's the point of having on-prem AD? Certificates and RADIUS can be done in the cloud now and integrate with Intune. Identity can be handled by Entra. GPO isn't necessary if everything's done by Intune. At some point, the need just goes away. It'll be the smaller businesses first, but eventually more companies will get to that point.
uebersoldat@reddit
Thank you for being the voice of reason. I feel like I'm in some too-expensive corpo conference with a bunch of reps pushing their cloud services on all our upper management. This is an IT sub right?
fadingcross@reddit
SQL runs on Linux.
There are also more SQL than MSSQL.
Windows Server is most certainly dying. There's no new applications being developed where anyone will say "LETS USE WINDOWS AS OUR PLATFORM"
As companies switch software to newer ones, Windows will die out and it'll likely speed up significantly on a 10-year basis.
plazman30@reddit
I think Microsoft's #1 self-hosted product now is SQL Server. And SQL Server runs on Linux now.
HotTakes4HotCakes@reddit
Also, the simplest argument is that Microsoft is immensely hostile to users and customers, just in general. They can and will fuck you over without a second's thought, and I shouldn't need to explain that to anybody on this sub.
Trusting them for full cloud integration is like volunteering to lock yourself in a room with your abuser forever and throw away the key.
SiteRelEnby@reddit
...windows still has servers? I thought microslop moved that all to azure so they can charge more money.
Small_Ad_793@reddit
Behold the Linux diehard fans, all coming to trash talk anything Microsoft or Windows and spread their hate just because they saw another post which has Microsoft in the title!
RoomyRoots@reddit
Windows is a shitty platform and Microsoft itself is pushing too much to move to the cloud. I doubt the OS division is as profitable and they wish it was.
Even end-user use Windows mostly because they are forced to.
Small_Ad_793@reddit
All Linux users here on reddit talking trash, as an IT admin for more than 10 years I know no one who is forced to use Windows, They use Windows because it just works! nobody is forced, every body is free to use any OS they want, you Linux diehard fans just like to trash anything Windows or Microsoft!
It's profitable, just a quick search will bring this up!
Verukins@reddit
while i agree its a shitty platform (and getting consistently worse) - controlling the desktop and having a signifciant (but diminishing) server footprint allows MS to easily implement integrations, force their bloatware/kill off the competition (if your old enough, think netscape) in certains areas etc
controlling the OS is how the empire was built - and while things are changing now - having control of the desktop (and again, significant server footprint too) gives strategic advantages..... looking at the OS as a standalone product and not as part of a broader ecosystem doesnt acknowledge that..
NightOfTheLivingHam@reddit
at this point the OS is a loss leader. It's there to collect data and push people into their cloud.
pompousrompus@reddit
It’s been a loss leader longer than it wasn’t at this point
PanicAdmin@reddit
For now the only reason to stay on windows is Excel.
The last barrier to fall before that was gaming, and steam destoyed it.
BB Microslop, and thx for solitaire, i guess.
Test-NetConnection@reddit
Windows server is so entrenched that it isn't going anywhere. There are just too many business applications that are built on windows. Critical functions like directory services and file shares are almost always windows-based because of NTFS and universal compatibility. On the Linux side, simple tasks like configuring static networking seems to change yearly and varies from distro to distro. This isn't suitable for enterprise environments where consistency is a requirement. Windows isn't suitable for micro services because of just how bloated it is, but I see far more persistent windows servers than Linux. The exception to this rule is "appliances" and simple, single-function servers where performance is a priority such as webservers.
walkalongtheriver@reddit
Dude...configuring networking?
This can't be a serious argument against Linux. C'mon. Not to mention the Linux way would be to just use ansible or some other automation software that configures networking itself no matter what is underneath.
I feel like you're so in MS world that you aren't seeing the broader landscape.
sofixa11@reddit
Yes, this has been the trend since at least~2015-2016. Most growth (new companies or new projects at existing companies) were either cloud(XaaS) first or Linux/container first.
Even companies very embedded in the Microsoft ecosystem with tens of thousands of Windows machines have projects to redo everything and get rid of most Windows.
Microsoft's own cloud, Azure, has a majority of Linux workloads.
FleaDad@reddit
Our team gutted our Windows platform in favor of Ubuntu a year ago. Updated everything to run dotnet core and never looked back. Went from 80% Windows to 5%. The cost savings was incredible.
RikiWardOG@reddit
Unless you have a specific need for a windows server, Linux is just such a better option these days.
chuckmilam@reddit
The specific need from management is usually: "We don't want to pay for Linux skills, and because we use Windows on our own machines, the familiar Windows GUI give us the illusion we know what our IT team is doing and so, we could totally do their jobs if we needed to."
Then...reality bites.
Windows95GOAT@reddit
Quite hard to sell 20$ a month vs 50k upfront, even with the best presentations and spreadsheets to the Csuites. Add to that the current hardware cartel driving up the prices which A) benefits them with the AI circlejerk and B) benefits them because the jump to cloud now looks even cheaper.
desmond_koh@reddit
You're just noticing this now??
From 2005 to about 2015 I put in about 8 to 10 servers a year - almost every month. I had a dedicated sales rep at Dell. My account with them was huge.
The last time I put a server in somewhere was 2019.
We're going to be doing another one soon - the first one in 7 years.
We have been getting lots of SMBs set up with Microsoft 365 Business Premium however. I kind of feel like Business Premium is the new Small Business Server.
theHonkiforium@reddit
I think you're right.
midwestbikerider@reddit
Win Server isn't going away anytime soon. The shift to containerization and AI/agentics will be rolled into new features and/or licensing options.
GhostDan@reddit
In general, the server market is shrinking with cloud/saas/paas services becoming more popular. Most companies, after completing a lift and shift to the cloud, then (hopefully) try to modernize their environment by utilizing services like hosted databases, Power Apps, etc.
I've been doing this over 30 years (as an architect now) and it's rare I log into a server these days.
spense01@reddit
Yes. It can’t die fast enough.
BrainWaveCC@reddit
More cloud utilization means less on-premises server utilization.
uptimefordays@reddit
The roles are just consolidating. In 2005 you could credibly say “I’m a computer infrastructure expert, I know Windows server, AD, DHCP (windows only), and Exchange. NO HARDWARE NO NETWORK!” Without blushing, but in today’s world infra teams will ask “why don’t you know enterprise hardware, Linux, a public cloud, etc?”
Apprehensive_Ad5398@reddit
Yes - I’m one of the people driving that (in my own small way). I started working with Windows professionally with NT4.
For decades, I was a windows and Microsoft zealot. “I’ll switch to Mac the day hell freezes over” - now I, and my entire team uses MacBook Pro. We stil have a few windows servers, primarily for AD/entra and file server (which is barely used - all GitHub/wiki and SharePoint for the small amount of docs that don’t go to the former).
I’m not a big fan of cloud though. It works, when you don’t have the people or the infrastructure to host yourself, but that convenience comes at a significant cost at our size. We’ve been actively migrating out of Azure into our own colos - running proxmox with CEPH in HA clusters, Debian VMs and a lot of docker/k8s.
Yeah, hell froze over.
Sharp_Animal_2708@reddit
the shift is real but it's slower than the cloud vendors want you to believe -- most enterprises I work with still run hybrid because the migration cost and latency tradeoffs don't pencil out for everything.
Perfect-Concern-9762@reddit
Azure cloud management, need need for on prem domain controls, exchange servers, less sql databases with cloud hosted sales platforms and inventory management etc
viral-architect@reddit
Still a no brainer for remote sites with spotty connections
StaticFanatic3@reddit
Honestly Business premium still feels like a pretty decent deal compared to most the software prices I see
Hell look at fucking Acrobat Standard / Pro. Nearly as much just for shitty PDF editing.
bnlf@reddit
Microsoft is making a lot more money whether people are using Windows or not with Azure.
literallymetaphoric@reddit
ChatGPT runs on Azure. Nadella and Altman have been in bed since the beginning.
pmormr@reddit
I'd be pretty nervous if I was Microsoft though, ChatGPT as a product is starting to look like it could share some qualities with betamax
safalafal@reddit
Betamax had the better technology - handsdown; its just that the movies were better on VHS. It didnt lose for technical reasons.
thepitredish@reddit
Betamax, tech-wise, was superior, but the runtime was longer for VHS, Sony had all kinds of fucked up licensing around Betamax, and of course… porn. The porn industry went all in on VHS.
someguy7710@reddit
Yeah, Betamax had licensing issues that made VHS win. Sony F'ed up on that one. They didn't repeat that with blueray, But of course the physical media war was lost to begin with.
patmorgan235@reddit
I mean it did lose for technical reasons, VHS had a longer run time capacity.
cincy15@reddit
VHS was porns preferred format, and you could record a full NFL game without switching tapes. That’s the cliffs notes version on why it won out.
8BFF4fpThY@reddit
Betamax didn't have the playtime that VHS did. People wanted the longer video rather than the higher quality.
alt-0191@reddit
I've worked in tech for 10 years and I would never willingly choose to use Windows server when I have Linux available. Several generations of people have grown up with Linux. They enter the workforce And when they get to side with technology they use that use Linux not Windows.
AndyceeIT@reddit
Yes, it has been for years.
For about 15 years AD/Exchange/Windows were gold for on-prem Enterprise. Now email is mostly cloud, the Windows Server model doesn't scale , and AD doesn't make sense without an on-prem private network.
desmond_koh@reddit
Yup, ain't that the truth.
Civil_Inspection579@reddit
less patching, less infra overhead, fewer things to babysit but it’s not disappearing, more like shrinking into specific use cases
Civil_Inspection579@reddit
less patching, less infra overhead, fewer things to babysit but it’s not disappearing, more like shrinking into specific use cases
SevaraB@reddit
Yes. We had hundreds of Windows servers and now we’re down to not more than a couple dozen. Everything new is being designed to be deployable via Kubernetes.
Even our network labbing has gone from GNS3 on Windows to Linux-native ContainerLab, which lets us model MUCH more complex topologies on the same hardware.
matt95110@reddit
My current company is deploying a lot more Linux servers to replace 2016 VMs.
gmerideth@reddit
Our company is aiming for 100% cloud, no servers, no on-prem equipment so yeap, no licensing other than 5x the cost in Office ones.
The new generation coming in don't know what RAM "does", never heard of RAID, barely know what network cables do and have never heard of mapping a drive with "net use."
So we save one area, loose generational knowledge in another but they are learning PowerShell scripts from our team instead of using the cluster that is the Office UI.
waxwayne@reddit
I was at a trade show looking for solutions for a VMS. I found one that was good but it only ran on Windows. I walked away.
glitch841@reddit
Yes anecdotally I would say its shrinking too. Mostly AD and on prem file servers or some critical windows only apps is what I see mostly these days.
Its not really because Windows is less capable in many areas but it does get shit on alot. Some of this is deserved but sometimes its just hate for hates sake.
Personally I would prefer to see more competition to drive innovation and quality. Linux is great and all but it has its own issues.
No OS is perfect but there are great ideas coming from the BSDs and Open Solaris forks that are quite interesting.
bemenaker@reddit
Unfortunately the replacements for file servers all suck. Onedrive is not better in anyway, people have just gotten used to working with it.
first_lvr@reddit
Not really
I work on a Microsoft partner, customer are paying windows servers like never before, specially because systems are requiring more and more resources :/
Jkabaseball@reddit
If you ask any of the off the self software we buy, Linux doesn't exist. There are probably a lot of internal applications that will be built with Linux in mind. There are also many "AAS" apps that you don't control the backend. Programming language, even the Microsoft ones like .NET are on both platforms.
AbleCryptographer744@reddit
I haven't worked at a company that had a large windows presence since 2012, which is not coincidentally when I moved to the bay area. I'm constantly surprised it still exists at all.
madwolfa@reddit
Good fucking riddance. Windows and servers don't belong to one sentence.
Kelsier25@reddit
Definitely on my side. F500 here and we're in the process of migrating all servers to Azure. They're so confident in the plan that we've already had potential buyers coming in to view our data center.
luckyrocker@reddit
Interested to know how it is going. Any big issues?
Lonely-Abalone-5104@reddit
Good riddance
Bob_Spud@reddit
It became obvious to Microsoft when they discovered more Linux servers on Azure than Winservers.
Microsoft are active in the Linux space, they were one of the main bidders for Red Hat, IBM got the prize in that deal.
Clivna@reddit
We were mostly on Windows / MSSQL but we are moving everything we can to docker and everything new is built with docker in mind.
It's better performance and a lot cheaper on our hosted hardware.
GremlinNZ@reddit
Depends partially on the market. Ie, in New Zealand, SMB is 5-35 staff. For most businesses in that space, SaaS absolutely makes sense. Spent a lot of time explaining to businesses the concept of unit costs.
You hire a staff member, they cost money, need a computer etc. Add licencing. Less volatility in costs, vs spending thousands every few years to replace the server (leasing through HPE was such a bullshit process).
However, there are apps that would be absolute rubbish in the cloud, or putting it in someone's datacentre would cost more (but up to them to take the risk of being on prem obviously). Microslop also loves to sell lift and shift, with big money to cover migration etc.
Easiest way to move. Also the most expensive. Funny that. Cloud is brilliant for elastic demand and scalable services where the app supports it. Running a whole server with OS etc in the cloud is a terrible way to do it.
Now internal IT, we have no servers, on prem but (urgh) we are using higher spec Micro desktops on each site for some basic stuff. Many situations simply don't have enough space for a server or micro server.
We then have a provider that handles our servers (DCs, SQL cluster, RDS farm etc) in their datacentre, and then we have cloud services. Basically, we pick and choose what we want from where to suit needs.
DerBootsMann@reddit
yeah , ppl switch to the web-hosted biz apps , so why bother ?
luckyrocker@reddit
As a VAR with experience across many organisations mostly 100 to 1000 users the short answer is yes. People are getting smarter at optimisation and IaC. Why have GBs of windows directories and updates to manage. SMBs that don’t touch it much still stay with it. But if you start running a large amount of workloads it just makes sense to go Kubernetes or similar. But there will always be that one app. Tehe.
I remember when VMware first stated being the norm (15 years ago?) someone told me that I took Linux to make windows run properly.
sobrique@reddit
Yeah. There's limited numbers of things that Windows is best at now, and those things are also the ones moving to SaaS/cloud pretty hard.
Platform agnostic stuff when you're able to spin up bespoke/cut down instances seems just generally to fit the Linux model better.
Still seems strong on desktop, and things that in one form or another supplement desktop though.
IWantsToBelieve@reddit
Yep paas everything!
Top-Perspective-4069@reddit
Spending my 22 years in mostly MS infrastructure, you're not wrong. It isn't going away but there are more options than ever for accomplishing similar goals. The PaaS options from the hyperscalers are attractive for companies who want to focus on building rather than maintaining infrastructure.
At the same time, there are always going to be specific use cases like application servers, database servers, and RDS farms (and lots of others) where, even if a real challenger exists, it doesn't make financial sense to dump the time and effort into migrating and retraining the user base.
czenst@reddit
Yeah MSFT wants you to be running on Azure and people who cannot afford Azure should be running Linux.
ArchusKanzaki@reddit
Don’t forget serverless push too. Don’t care about the OS, just need the container to run.
But well… it will be shrinking but it won’t be gone. That’s my thinking. Some things are just easier on Windows Server. At the very least, you won’t tear your hair troubleshooting random stuffs just because you don’t want to pay for abit of license
TechCF@reddit
Yes, I have been doing it for the last 20 years. Down from several hundred to a couple of dozen servers today. Windows only around year 2000. Peak number of servers was about 2015, 50/50% Linux and Windows.
shimoheihei2@reddit
All the Big Tech companies are pushing subscriptions and cloud first, this isn't new. I wouldn't be surprised if Windows Server features get cut over time. They make a lot more money off you in Azure. And executives are all too happy to oblige.
Escanut@reddit
In my IT support role during college 2022, the entire company used Windows ( It was a manufacturing plant ).
Nowadays I don't hear of it as much, seems cloud providers are just being used more i guess.