A little background: We have several Windows servers (2003, 2008) for our department. We're a division of IT so we manage our own servers. Of the four of us here I'm the only one with a slight amount of IT knowledge. (Note the "slight amount".) My boss says the servers need to be restarted at least weekly. I disagree. Our IT Department says that because she restarts them constantly that's the reason why our hard drives fail and power supplies go out on them. (That's happened to a few of our servers a couple times over the last four years, and very recently.)
So the question is: How often does everyone restart their Windows servers? Is there an industry standard or recommendation? Is our IT department correct in saying that because we re-start that's why we're having hardware issues? (I need a reason if I'm going to change her mind!)
Best Answer
I strongly disagree. Microsoft has made great strides since the good-ole [NT, anyone?] days with regard to stability and uptime. It's a shame the consensus within IT support has not changed along with this.
Only when required -- Either because of an OS/software update, a critical software failure which cannot be recovered via other methods, hardware upgrade/replacement or other activity that cannot happen without a restart.1
I have never seen a standard recommendation, per se, but I could not agree with any recommendation [except from MS themselves] which would indicate a required reboot at a specific time interval "just-because".
Restarting [and, more so, power cycling] is the most stressful period of hardware activity for a computer. You have most everything spinning up to 100% -- disk and fans... ...as well as significant fluctuations in component temperatures. Modern hardware is incredibly resilient, but that shouldn't be a reason for just bouncing servers, on a whim, a few times a week.
1 Aside, I loathe when techs "just" reboot a Windows server in the case of a failed service, or the like. I understand the need to get the service running again, but a reboot should be the last step in trouble shooting a server. Identifying, and fixing[!], the root cause of failure should almost never result in "Meh, just reboot it...."