Windows 7 as a File Server – Why We Won’t Do It.

Over the years we have had many smaller clients that don’t want to spend the money to invest in a true server and want to use XP Pro or Windows 7 Pro as a file server.  Although we strongly recommended against it, a few insisted.  Since they were under contract, we were obligated to service and support the “server” and encountered many problems.  None of those clients are still with us (by our choice).

For anyone out there with clients considering doing this, I have put together several reasons why we do not recommend/support this scenario.

1. Windows 7 is a consumer OS. Windows server is a server OS. 
   1. A server OS is supposed to be up 24/7. A consumer OS is not.
   2. IIS will on Windows 7 only allow 10 concurrent connections and 20 connections for file shares.  While this is more than enough for most small offices, what we have found is that Windows 7 holds onto the connection and eventually users can’t connect. 

1. Hardware – there are the following differences (some of these are related to motherboard support which is tied to these processors): 
   1. Higher chip validation (i.e. testing) 
   2. Multi-processor support
   3. Support for more error resistant hardware (ECC memory, battery backed controllers) 
   4. Redundant BIOS images in case of corruption/failure 
   5. Support for larger amounts of memory (many many more RAM slots)
   6. etc. 
   7. Server CPUs are usually the very highest quality chips out of a batch… they handle the stresses and constant operation of a server environment better than desktop CPUs.
   8. Permissions – Permissions are rules associated with objects on a computer or network, such as files and folders. Permissions determine whether you can access an object and what you can do with it. For example, you might have access to a document on a shared folder on a network. And even though you can read the document, you might not have permissions to make changes to it. System administrators and people with administrator accounts on computers can assign permissions to individual users or groups.
      1. If you need to setup permissions for users to have different levels of access to different files, stop now.  While it is technically possible, it is a PITA to maintain.  Google “windows 7 permissions problem” and you will see 26,000 entries. 
      2. Someone is going to use it as a workstation.  Typically with a server OS, people are scared of it and will not touch it, however a file server running Windows 7 is just like every other machine in the office.  When the customer adds an additional user, or one of the other PC’s in the office goes down, invariably they think “They can use the file server.  It has Windows 7, what could go wrong?”

There are a lot of people that will tell you that Windows7 is fine for a file server.  There are also a lot of people that will tell you to use any number of a variety of Linux OS’s, or to just get a NAS, and while those are viable options for some, we cannot recommend it because we can’t efficiently support it.