How Windows Server helped your career?

Started with NT with 3.5, MCSE with 4.0 and have been supporting schools using Windows Server since 2000. My whole career has been Windows based.

Many years of studying Windows Server. Each version released a new feature made me more excited!

I must be showing my age now, but my first experiences were with Windows NT 3.51 over 20 years ago. 

I've administered every version since, seeing features and user interfaces come and go. The OS has underpinned my career and without it I probably wouldn't have followed the path that it has.

I'm at ignite this year for the first time and am looking forward to seeing the new features.

Paul

As a Unix developer in the 90s, I built an FTP server for Windows simply to avoid having to trudge up and down the hallway with a floppy disk in my hand every time I wanted to take new code from the version control system (DOS-based) to the Sun workstation.
Then it became fun to point out to my Unix colleagues that I was running reliable Internet server software on a Windows machine, and finally it just seemed notably easier to write reliable software for Windows than for Unix.

I've been Windows-centric ever since, and was able to be a work-from-home dad as a result.

I used to have an OS/2 shirt that said "Windows NT - Nice Try"

You see which one is still around, right?

My NT4 MCSE, which I earned after taking classes for nearly 6 months in the evenings, helped me get my first major raise, in addition to helping me move from the HelpDesk to the Systems team.

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

I've been administering servers since Windows NT4.0.   Got my MCSE in Windows 2000 and haven't looked back since then.  I've touched about every technology that Windows Server has to offer.  I even still have a Windows Server 2003 Pen back when it was launched :)