Chapter 8. Tiny Servers

"Honey, I shrunk the server!" Another chapter, another outdated movie reference. Terribly sorry about that. Moving on to the topic—over the past 20 or more years we have seen nothing but growth out of the Microsoft operating systems. Growth can be good, like new features and enhancements to make our lives easier. Growth can also be bad, like bloated file structures and memory-hog graphical interfaces. If you were to graph chronologically Windows and Windows Server operating systems by terms of their footprints, based on factors like disk space consumption and memory requirements, it would show a steady upward grade. Every new release requires just a little more processing power, and just a little more hard drive space than the previous version. That was the case, until—I'm guesstimating a little bit here—maybe Windows 8 and Server 2012. We saw some surprising steps taken with lowering these threshold numbers, a welcome change. But the change wasn't too dramatic. I...