As a Unix/Linux admin, I find administering Windows servers boring and tedious. Until now. With Server Core 2012, you get Powershell pre-installed. Some of the windowish apps, still launch little windows (e.g. Xen Tools) but for the most part, I find I can deploy servers much more quickly simply by using SCONFIG. To me, this is much quicker than hovering a mouse all over trying to find where they've hidden the thing you need now (seems to change in every version).
This isn't Windows Server Core, but you get the idea. The menus are pretty self explanatory. I find configuring a system with this much quicker! All I needed was a command line disk utility (which has been around a long time I know). Brushing up on the commands, I was able to quickly deploy a new disk. I will post the command line version of iSCSI when that comes up (soon, I'm sure).
Again, all pretty straight forward. This looks a little more complicated than the GUI but I'll bet if I raced someone, they would not be able to find the utility, right click, etc. etc. as quickly.
Although this isn't showing it off much, I am really loving the power of Powershell. I like how all of my Unix commands like ls and cat are already aliased (I used to have to make a ls.bat and cat.bat, etc.). With Windows Server Core 2012 R2's command line utilities, and powerful shell, I might actually start to enjoy this OS again. It's becoming more Unix-like everyday - and that's a good thing (for me anyway).
