How Windows Server helped your career?

My first Azure deployment involved migrating an entire Government agency into Azure. (stay with me, this is totally WinSRV related) - The customer had a mix of OS versions from 2k3 x86 to 2k12R2 - My long term support of NT4 up to 2k12R2 really helped me to understand the nuances of each OS server version at a very low level, as with the earlier versions you really needed to know what was under the hood (shout out to anyone that has built a cluster using 2k3 server for example).

The customer had a large amount of legacy but still core production systems that could not be re-homed, so I had to move a number of 2k3 VMs to Azure from VMWare. It was a challenge, there was a lot of swearing, crying and frustration (mostly from me because I was trying to do something completely unsupported)  but I managed to shoehorn in the Hyper-V integration drivers (MSI Installer was not supported for this OS version so I extracted the DLL's and .SYS files, copied them to the relevant locations and crafted the registry entries for each virtualised driver and then created the "Fake" devices in device manager) and then use Azure Site Recovery to replicate and migrate the VMs into Azure.

To my delight the VM's came up healthy and no BSOD in site, this really highlighted how robust the Windows Server platform is. Even back in the 2k3 generation days, I had taken a Server that was not designed to run as a VM, let alone on a cloud platform into Azure.

Now my career extends into all things Azure as a technical evangelist who guides customers through their journey to the cloud, but I still have my roots in place. Even though I strongly promote PaaS services to my customers I know that behind the scenes there is a Windows Server hosting most of those services and it makes me Smile :D