Anyone have any practical experience with Windows Server 2008 Core edition? Just curious to see what people think about it who have used it. I'm downloading the demo of R2 now.

A slimmer, and potentially easier to remotely manage server seems like a nice idea. Just not sure how well Microsoft executed on these goals. Especially when the first time I saw the "GUI less" interface, it was a GUI with a CMD.exe window open. Hopefully R2 improves a bit from this.

What do you plan on doing with it Tom?
I get to play with it a bit at work.
I'll be nice, it is interesting.

Nothing specific to Microsoft server functions, mostly looking to evaluate it as a platform to run custom server programs on.

Core seems like a solution to a problem that isn't there. Unix was designed bottom up to not have a GUI, and grafted the gui on top. Windows Core just the opposite, they've chopped the gui off. How many utilities assume there's a GUI available on windows? It'd bet pretty much all of them.

So you're building a custom system, restricting yourself to custom software or a limited set of commercial software. You've got to be building a decent quantity of them to even be looking at core. At that point, what are you getting from MS that you're not getting from Linux for free?

The GUI is still there though. Assuming your app doesn't need Windows Explorer or Internet Explorer to be present then most things should still run. All configuration is done remotely via MMC or locally via the command line. Nothing stopping your app from display whatever it wants itself.

Not really, no.

I'm evaluating what Microsoft has, and looking at how easy/hard it is to remote manage and deploy apps with. As for Linux, the up front cost really isn't much of a factor, and it is a solution that I'm considering as well. I just need to know about all the options in front of me to be able to present it properly to others as well. My knowledge of MS server software pretty much ends at 2003.

Looks like someone forgot to finish the documentation on Technet: