Off the top of my head you won't actually miss out on any (current) features. I think there are plans to make use of websockets in the Episerver UI going forward, but to my knowledge there are no such features currently in place.

Hi, 

The one feature you wouldn't be able to use is the Projects feature which relies on WebSockets support. Otherwise, other current features are available and CMS 9 should work for the most part. It's just that we won't officially support that version of Windows moving forward.

Hi Richly,

From the looks of it in the Alloy Demo Kit (https://github.com/episerver/AlloyDemoKit) I am guessing that the EPiServer Projects feature uses SignalR (http://www.asp.net/signalr) which provides abstraction over the communication mechanism (websockets, server sent events, ajax long polling, etc).

Websockets being the preferred approach, upgrading to Windows Server 2012 would enable the usage of websockets for better performance in the bi-directional communication. However I think EPiServer Projects might still be able to fallback if Websockets is not supported.

TL;DR: I think EPiServer Projects relies on SignalR, hence it would still be supported on Win 2008 (R2) using a fallback mechanism - instead of websockets -.

A quick test should be able to confirm the dependency.

Regards,

@Wacdany, I'm afraid that your guess in this case is incorrect. The AlloyDemoKit is a demo project created to showcase possibilites with the platform and while it uses SignalR, this has nothing to do with the Projects feature in the CMS platform. The Projects feature uses WebSockets directly which is why Windows Server 2012 is required. The reason for this is that SignalR carries quite a few dependencies with it both on server and client side and uses a initialization model (Katana) that does not match up very well with the framework initialization model in Episerver CMS.

A quick test would indeed be able to confirm the lack of such a dependency ;)

@Henrik, Thanks for the double confirmation!

I can live with not having access to certain new features, but could running EPi 9 on win 2008 cause any issues?

Thanks

I'm interested to hear how this went. Upgrading to the newest Episerver.UI (9.4.0), Episerver would throw an error if Websockets was not installed on the server (required by the Projects feature, even when it was not enabled yet by the site admin). See this blog post: http://world.episerver.com/blogs/Eric-Pettersson/Dates/2016/2/fixing-the-websocket-protocol-support-issue-when-upgrading-to-episerver-ui-9-4-0/

So if Windows Server 2008 does not support the installation of Websockets, this could be a showstopper. 

Any update on this, Sara?

I'm on CMS 9.3.2 and it seems to be working fine on Server 2008 r2, IIS7

I certainly haven't seen the error described here: http://world.episerver.com/blogs/Eric-Pettersson/Dates/2016/2/fixing-the-websocket-protocol-support-issue-when-upgrading-to-episerver-ui-9-4-0/

Looks like project instant updates were released in 9.4: http://world.episerver.com/documentation/Release-Notes/?versionFilter=9.4.1&packageFilter=EPiServer.CMS.UI&typeFilter=All&packageGroup=CMS

Wondering if I should roll back anyway.

In some ways it's great that updates are so readily available, but some organisations cannot move as quickly when it comes to upgrading servers etc.