UK organisations at both the enterprise and SME end are struggling with cost and support of their server operating systems, according to exclusive research carried out by ZDNet UK.

When asked what their main challenges were in working with server OSes, cost of both operating such environments and licencing of software, support and reliability were identified as the most pressing issues.

“Forced redundancy of the OS (currently using Windows 2003). Cost. Management interface makes it difficult to find options,” and “The level of expertise required to manage a simple (Microsoft SBS) server is dreadful,” were two of the most representative comments of the 200 IT professionals who took part.

The operating systems at the server level most commonly the source of these issues – as most popular operating systems - were Windows and the two main varieties of Linux, Red Hat and Novell’s SuSE. Some 81% of respondents were Windows users at the server level and 50 % are now on Linux, with these two ahead of other OSes such as Solaris (next biggest UNIX at 26 %). Over half (51 %) use a combination of two or more operating systems, but 44 % use just one.

Perhaps because of the struggle to get better value out of server software, few respondents seem to be aggressively implementing virtualisation. While flagging it as an issue along with consolidation for the next five years priority-wise, virtualisation was bottom of users’ needs in terms of importance. Scalability, high reliability/failover, identity management and aggregation and account management as well as systems management all top virtualisation as desirable OS features factor for this group.

The data also suggests that many UK systems managers are not rushing into adoption of Windows Server 2008, the latest version of Microsoft’s server offering.

When asked about their deployment plans in this area, only 8% of the sample say they have upgraded, with 41% claiming they had no plans at all to install it. This figure will reflect the large number of Linux sites in the survey no doubt, but even of those who do want to make the switch, only 25% see it happening in the next 12, some don’t see it worth doing until 2009 or 2010 (12%), and 3% 2011 on.

“Though there are some interesting differences with our findings, this survey does seem to be a pretty good reflection of how we see server usage,” says Chris Ingle, consulting research director for systems at analyst group IDC.

So – do you agree? Is this reflective of your reality, and if not, why not?