Having just finished studies for my 70-680 Windows 7 exam, I have begun my studies on upgrading my MCSE 2003 to 2008 (MCTS). I’ve been using Windows 2008 / R2 for a bit over a year now and am very familiar with most of the day to day running of it and a lot of the more in depth features also. But this experience has been restricted to time critical real world scenarios; that is to say that I haven’t had time to explore all potentially beneficial features and that when it came to projects I have general stuck to what I know has worked in the past. One of the features I am now very keen to test out is Server Core installation mode. The bar bones version of Windows 2008, with no GUI (command line interface only), but most essential server roles and features. Next week I plan to install some 2008 R2 VMs at home in Core mode to play around with them a little. Some things that I am keen to explore further are:

• Can you install and run any 3rd party applications on server core; specifically Antivirus
• Can you run a file server with DFS enabled and configured
• Do you get much performance increase over a full blown installation…is it worth it for increase performance, or only increase security?