Running resource PCs on Windows Server installations

[Anonymous]

I had a discussion with some people from Operations at my company, and they are convinced that we could easily switch from running our resource PC instances on Win7 to running them on Windows Server 2012. The reason is that our servers are a more stable environment, because software updates wont be continually pushed to the servers like they are on our regular Win7 desktops. I am not completely comfortable with this idea, since I know our target applications have been optimized for the desktop build. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Of course we have to test each target app on a server, and see if it works. But I'm curious if anyone else have tried doing something similar, and if so, whether they have had any success. We are already resource PCs on a few servers, and it seems t work just fine for some of our simplet processes If anyone has any input regarding things that we might want to take into consideration before making the switch, please pitch in! Any obvious caveats?

[RobinToll]

There is no particular contraindication from running on Windows Server. There are two big reasons I'm aware of why the majority of installs use Windows 7/desktop versions of the OS: 1) Since BP installs are frequently based off of or identical to installs for customer service staff, it's usually simpler to leave it a desktop image rather than building a specialized image using a server OS. 2) Server OS installs tend to have a higher licensing cost. As of 5.0 (as listed in the install documentation), we officially support: Windows XP (SP2+) Windows Vista (32/64) Windows 7 (32/64) Windows 8.1 (32/64) Windows 10 (32/64) Windows Server 2000 (SP4) Windows Server 2003 (SP1, 32/64) Windows Server 2008 (32/64) Windows Server 2012 (32/64) Hope this helps, -Robin Toll

[Anonymous]

Thank you very much! This is exactly the kind of reply i was looking/hoping for. We are facing a strange situation, where it might actually be cheaper to run servers for us, so we will begin experimenting with it, and see how it goes. /Indika

[RohitLotlikar]

I have a related query. At one of our clients, we have a production set where the resource PCs are Windows 7. We are in the process of setting up an additional environment using Windows Server (2012) for resource PC's. Is it reasonable to expect that process developed previously on Windows 7/10 would run without issues on Windows Server (2012) resource PCs?

[MikeMiller]

We are in a similar boat - but I'm more interested in the GPO/Security settings as they related to Internet Explorer.