Deployment improvements

Finally, the deployment improvements are shown in Figure 7. For setup time, Nano Server takes just 35 seconds compared with almost 5 minutes for Server Core. This is a huge improvement here. You will see where these 35 seconds came from in Chapter 3, Deploying Nano Server in a Virtual Machine and on Physical Hardware. You don't have to actually use Windows setup. Basically, you copy an image that you already created an unattended file for; that 35 seconds setup includes the time to create the unattended file. As for physical deployment using commodity hardware 100 MB switch with Windows Deployment Server (WDS) and PXE boot, Nano Server was fully provisioned in 3 minutes, whereas Server Core using the exact same configuration just switching to a Server Core image was 19 minutes. This is quite an improvement. The setup time is a one-time operation typically; the reboot time took only 15 seconds using the same hardware with spindle disks. The reboot times might vary based on your hardware especially with SSDs. This is quite impressive.

For the disk footprint, Nano Server is 460 MB; that's why it can boot and deploy so quickly, whereas Server Core is almost 5.42 GB. This is assuming you did not add any extra packages; as an example, with the Hyper-V (compute) package, the image will be under 460 MB, because Hyper-V is such a small footprint of hypervisor.

As for VHD size, there is a little bit of overhead here. When you are running in a virtual machine, as you can see, Windows Server Core went up from almost 5.42 GB to a little over 6 GB, and Nano Server goes from 460 MB to 480 MB: