Couchbase on non-server Windows OS

The supported platform page indicates that non server OSes (e.g. Windows 7-10) are supported for development and testing use only. Is there any technical reason why we can’t use non-server OS to run Couchbase in a production environment? Is Couchbase using any special OS features that are only available on server-grade OS? Thanks.

Windows client in general isn’t tuned to run scalable server side processes and we don’t fully test cluster deployments on windows client.
There are a few things that make client vs server on windows different: Networking is one of them, number of processors and total memory supported on client is smaller and scheduling of processes is also different. With these limitations, you won’t get the best performance by running couchbase server on client OSs.
Hope this helps.
-cihan

Thanks. So limited performance is the main drawback? No other dependencies on Server OS components/features otherwise? We are currently using SQL Express in our application; we are evaluating using Couchbase as the back-end DB.

Are you planning on deploying a single node couchbase server or a multi node cluster?

thanks
-cihan

We would like to use the clustering capability, mainly for fault-tolerance, not for scalability/performance since we don’t anticipate a heavy load on the DB. If that’s not recommend, we can potentially just deploy a single node instance, and use XDCR to asynchronously replicate the data to a standby node. I actually prefer the XDCR approach since it seems to be simpler to setup. Assuming no special precaution in using XDCR on non-server OS? Thanks.

Got it thanks. Sounds like you don’t have strict requirements on HA or Perf so this could work.

For full transparency, we do cluster level testing on Windows Server so on client OSs, there may be a few gotcha’s like firewall rules, network settings etc. From a supported vs unsupported standpoint, you are in developer supported area. So if you’d like to use enterprise edition and get full support and the additional capabilities like security, tooling, HA, scale/perf and others, we ask that you move to Windows Server.
thanks
-cihan