Running a Microsoft enterprise stack at home?

[Paladin]

Can you do it? Probably.
Should you? Heck no, not unless you are doing it as a learning exercise and don't care how often it blows up or you can't do basic stuff that worked on Google just fine.

It's meant for teams of people in business/enterprise environments with a lot of money to spend. You'll spend way more on licensing, time wasted and hardware than just paying for the google stuff will cost. Plus google just gave in and is letting free gsuite users migrate to free personal accounts anyway. Probably still a pain but much more manageable.

I mean, if you're even thinking about running Exchange for actual email with other people in the rest of the world, that can be really frustrating and difficult to do from a home internet connection. That alone would be a deal breaker for me.

Running it all as a test/demo/lab is one thing but for production, no way.

 

[Paladin]

You wanted to run a full Microsoft enterprise stack on 8GB total RAM?



16GB is *extremely* scant for that kind of thing. 8GB for an exchange server (MS recommends 64-128GB but you might get it to install and start at least?) and 4GB for a single domain controller. 2GB for a hyper-V host (just hyper-v, not Windows Server). And I would only do that to prove I *could*, not that I should.

32GB is the bare minimum I would do for a Microsoft VM hypervisor to run Windows servers on it. If you were running Linux with a handful of containers you might get by with 8-16GB for the host but that's about it.

 

[Paladin]

LOL, no. Just practicality. It's all good trying to cram an OS into too little RAM as an educational experience but eventually you will want to be able to run Windows Update and still be able to browse the web at the same time or whatever and it will just be slow as mud or even crash. With Server Core you can get away with a lot less RAM though. If you use Windows Admin Center you can do a lot more with less for sure. Personally, if I were gung ho to really do a lab setup and use it for actual live stuff, I would just go looking for a used Dell server with at least 32GB of RAM, 64GB really. They can be had really cheap if you look around and are willing to put in your own drives.

 

[Paladin]

I HOPE they stick to it hard. It's a great start of a useful tool and if they keep it up and push it hard as a preferred management environment it could be excellent. Imagine if it some day incorporates things like modules for MSSQL management studio and everything with some kind of virtual explorer.exe and window environment so you can simply use it to run whatever application you want that would normally require a remote desktop session or something to run/manage.