W2k3 vs W2k8 first impressions

W2k8 was not hard to install. Actually it was almost easy. Administration wasn’t hard. Most things went right on. Performance was ok. W2k3 was a royal pain to install, and I am not done yet. Administration … well, between the network adapters which, after being told to use a fixed IP address seem to still wish to acquire an IP address, to the IIS which refuses to install unless SP2 CD is available (this is W2k3 SP2 BTW) …

8 hours in and I don’t have W2k3 up and installed. It is partially running, and I have to do lots of hand tweaking at each boot to get it going. Adding roles. It seems to insist upon monkeying with my networking when I want to install roles. Why? Well, hopefully by this evening I will have W2k3 successfully installed. It has been a pain, and by all appearances, using it will be a pain. My initial impressions are the W2k8 is reasonably good. I don’t have a positive impression of W2k3. Update Ok, it was asking for the wrong CD. Go figure. It really wanted the installation CD, not the SP2 CD. All this stuff should be installable over the net though, without media. I had taken the family to dinner, and made up my mind that if we couldn’t get this going within the hour, I would simply install Apache and run the benchmark already. Grrrr…