Power consumed by GUI MS Server 2012 versus MS Server 2012 Core

Question

How much performance increase would you get from running MS Server 2012 Core versus MS Server 2012 with a GUI.

I know it's impossible to give an exact percentile, but would you notice as much as a 20% increase in performance for example.

How much overhead is the GUI creating?

Answer 1

Firstly, Microsoft recommend headless for VM Host, but honestly, I think you are going to be hard-pressed to see that. The extra admin when you don't have a GUI is a pain. I suspect if you have a few racks full of servers doing live migrations, on the fly balancing load, etc. then maybe - but a single one. I really don't see it. If you look at the Linux model, where you load the GUID "sort of" afterwards, has very little impact on quite lowly hardware. Theoretically, according to the MS licensing, you are not really supposed to have ANYTHING running on the host, so should be minuscule.