Not a fair comparison. Nano is extremely cool, and very different, but honestly, when you or I say "Windows Server 2016" no one thinks we're talking about Nano Server implicitly. Nano has no GUI. According to Microsoft, Nano Server has 93 percent lower VHD size, 92 percent fewer critical security advisories, and 80 percent fewer reboots than Windows Server.
Nano was also absolutely necessary if Microsoft was to remain a player in cloud server farms. Putting regular Windows Server in an Amazon EC2 setting is certainly possible, but it's just silly unless you have no other option. The Nano approach is the only sane one, and I'm very glad Microsoft finally saw the light and produced a serious release of Windows that doesn't have a flaming GUI as its interface.
> On the client side, I think the biggest factor is going to be WMF5, and how much of that will back-port to W7 and how soon that will be available.
I'm concerned that Win7 won't get nearly the attention it should with backports and such. Something is going on to move everything to Win10, and it's something no one is talking about (yet). I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but there's some crazy shiite going on behind the scenes.
> On the server side, the major change in the GUI is a shift in philosophy. They spent most of their effort on getting rid of it.
Well, that's a relief. The sooner we can administer Windows like a serious server instead of a video game, the better.
I didn't think it was a fair comparison to limit the assessment of the upgrade to just the full GUI installs, when that's not where they've been focusing their development efforts.
Nano server is a different animal, but still built on the same code.
Headless Windows servers and command line management are not new. The default installation option is Server Core, which is not as lean as Nano, but still much better than a full Server install with the GUI.
Nano server is not standalone. Those instances will run in containers, and you need at least a Server Core instance to provide the hypervisor. You can also run Linux instances in containers along side them. Even discounting Nano Server, that still leaves the upgrades to Hyper-V to provide the container environment and management platform to consider. I'd consider at least that much to be very much a part of what people think of when you or I say "Windows Server".