Terrible Design
This model is horrid. Firstly, in Windows Server 2008 the required hard disk size is 10GB, with a recommended 40GB drive in the Official Microsoft System requirements. I have many Windows 2008 servers. Due to security controls and best practices, we separate out different things to different partitions, and rarely do we budget a large amount of space for the boot partition. So we opted simply to use the recommended settings of 40GB.
Had I known of this issue prior to installation I would have budgeted 150GB or so per server. Now I have over 100 local/remote servers with boot partitions that contain 10-15GB of unusable space (or duplicate space, however you want to explain it) that counts against the boot partitions of the drives. This is really unacceptable. 30% of my partition space is taken up with winsxs folders.
But what is worse than that even is the addition it puts on backup/restore operations. In order to do a full system backup and not exclude this folder (because what does it mean if we do exclude it?) we are adding 1-1.5 TB to our backup requirements. Storage is cheap, but time isn't, and that extra processing time is a large net loss in the big scheme of things. Extremely poor design and implementation my Microsoft. EXTREMELY POOR!
