I'm in the process of upgrading a few systems from Server 2003 – which is the bulk of my deployment – to Server 2008 R2*. I know there are still a lot of people out there with Server 2003/Server 2003/R2 deployments that have yet to make the jump. I'd like to pass along a few thoughts on the reasons why upgrading is a good choice, especially to those who work in a resource-constrained environment where even a single Server 2008 R2 licence would be a Big Ask.
The condescending fanboy responses of "but that's 10 years old!" don't add to the conversation; they presume that "new for the sake of new" has value and fail to articulate a value proposition we might care about. A feature list isn't going to help much and there is a lot of propaganda and enterprise-targeted stuff out there that just doesn't apply to folks way down on the bottom of the pole. So what are the things that you, the SMALL business sysadmin will actually notice?
The first is that "the little things" have taken a bump up in the ease-of-use territory. Consider DHCP; in the Server 2003 world, you have to write the MAC address down, create a new reservation and fill it all back in. In the Server 2008 R2 world, you right click on the DHCP lease in the gui and "add reservation." Easy peasy.
Second is Microsoft's software RAID 5. In Server 2003 this was horribly, horribly broken. It is still slower than hardware – and unbelievably CPU intensive – but it is works well enough that when I feed my 8 core Shanghai Opteron server 8 Hyper-X SSDs, I can hit a sustained 1280 megaBYTE per second read or write (enough to flatten a 10GbE link) using Windows' software RAID. I wouldn't use RAID 5 for primary storage, however…
…Volume Shadow Copy doesn't suck any more. When combined with Windows RAID, you can do some good things. You also get image-based backups free as part of the native Windows Backup…and Windows Backup itself is not too shabby. If you can't afford proper Server backup software, this "bonus" with the OS is a nice selling point.
SMB 2.1 is way better than CIFS. (Let's be honest, that wasn't hard.) A Windows 7 on Server 2008 R2 environment is far, far faster than Windows 7 on Server 2003. If your users are starting to get tetchy about the speed of your servers, you'd be surprised how much of a boost just upping the SMB version will get you.
Group Policy Management is now a standard part of the OS (you don't have to go hunt it down for every server) and the Print Management console will save your sanity. Similarly, Windows Server Update services is simply a role you install; no more faffing about with that terrible installer for Server 2003.
DFSR also gets a bump; most of the weird delete errors went away with this release. The file-lock errors are (mostly) gone and the speed of both change polling and RDC seems to be greatly improved.
In all, Server 2008 R2 doesn't really let you do anything new that most SMBs really care about, but it sure makes doing those things faster, easier and more efficient. Especially if you have a limited number of servers, give it a good look over.
If you are interested in Server 2012 – either because you will RDP into the server itself for administration, or because you are willing to use PowerShell or Windows 8 to remotely administer it – I strongly encourage its use over Server 2008 R2 wherever possible. It finally has a Hyper-V that doesn't suck. Failover Clustering works (it supports VHDs), there is a truly massive bump in the storage subsystem, and IIS finally joined the 21st century!
Rather than bore you with the details on "why" for Server 2012 – you are probably inundated with lots of that already – I'll just leave you some of my articles. You can peruse if 2012 is a viable option in your environment.
10 best Server 2012 features: http:/
MS 2012 virtualisation: http:/
2012 overview: http:/
I hope that helps some other SMB sysadmins argue the value of the upgrade to their clients and/or employers. Server 2008 R2 is one of those things that just saves us as administrators a lot of time.
*There is the odd Server 2012 deployment, when I can make an isolated server. It's really hard to see uptake on that OS since 2012 RSAT only works with Windows 8 and Windows 8 is universally loathed amongst my client base.