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James Gibbons's avatar
James Gibbons
Copper Contributor
Jul 16, 2017
Solved

So Windows Server Insiders is only the Core Version. How About Next Month the Full Server Is Avail..

We all understand that Microsoft wants everybody to use Server Core and we understand that in production when at all possible we will use Server Core if it is possible, i.e. (all the programs that we...
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Jeff-Woolsey's avatar
Jeff-Woolsey
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Apr 25, 2018

Hey folks,

 

Thanks for the note. We've been watching carefully as the industry changes and transforms to embrace new application models such as containers and others. We've also been listening to you as you adopt the Long Term Servicing Channel and the Semi-Annual Channel releases.

 

Here's the short answer: The summary is that customer adoption of SAC is almost entirely containers. SAC adoption on hardware was minimal as most people can’t churn their hardware that quickly. For that reason, we pivoted the SAC releases to containers and application innovation since they can easily take a new change, update a container and publish as part of their CI/CD pipeline. Since containers have no GUI, SAC is Server Core and Nano Server. It literally makes no sense to release a SAC build with a GUI. That's why only LTSC includes GUI.

 

For a detailed explanation, see this blog:
https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/windowsserver/2018/03/29/windows-server-semi-annual-channel-update/