Windows Server 2016

Gopal Dasari

A little background

I represent the IT wing of the The Saint Paul and Minnesota Community Foundation.

We use the Blackbaud products of The Financial Edge (version  7.87.164.0022), The Raiser's Edge (version 7.96.6401.8) and Blackbaud Net Community (version 6.64.141.21).

We also use the Fusion labs products of Grantedge (4.7.0.18) and Spectrum Web Portal (version  1.11.0.5) for our grant making.


We are currently self-hosted.
Our Sql Server version is 2008 R2 and Winder Server version is 2008. Our current environment, though with daily backups of dbs,  is a single point failover system.

If our production server goes down or if there is a planned outage during some upgrade, we don't have an alternate server to run during the outage. 

We have an ambitious plan to upgrade our SQL Server to version 2014 within the next 6 weeks.

The plan is to build a new environment with Windows Cluster Server which we are hoping will provide us the needed high availability of systems to our users.

Now the question -

This being a once in a 10 year effort for our organization, we are hoping to implement the most current versions that are made available by Microsoft.
As per the most current system requirements specs published by Blackbaud, we can upgrade sql server to 2014 and Windows server to 2012 R2.

As you all may know already that the life span of Windows Server 2012 R2 is soon coming to an end.

The end of life date happens to be 10/09/2018 and End of Support date is 10/10/2023.


So, we are hoping to go with the most current Operating System available in market now - Windows Server 2016.


I am hoping if there are any users out there within our community who are currently using Windows Server 2016 and can provide us any feedback, before we can take the plunge.

How are the Blackbaud edge applications working within the Windows Server 2016 OS ?
Are there any known issues that can be deemed as showstoppers or critical?

Are there any high priority issues with work arounds?
If Blackbaud is currently testing in this server version,  can blackbaud make any observations for us?