What operating system are you using ? Windows or a specific version of Linux ? Any Microsoft 2012 users out here ?
When I worked on OpenMRS I think I used Linux – possibly Windows Vista or 7…it shouldn’t be an issue because java literally runs everywhere! I use Linux Mint personally.
Well, I’m not an windows enthusiast, so take my words with a pinch of salt.
That said…
Ubuntu LTS is by far, by far, the most ‘standard’ linux flavour you’ll find in servers for cloud, and on my experience on the devops circles too ( http://fossbytes.com/ubuntu-linux-is-the-most-popular-operating-system-in-cloud/). It’s absolutely not uncommon to see linux servers which are running for a year or too without restarts.
It’s default, every puppet module supports it, docker has an outstanding support for it, debian and ppa packages make the community vibrant, you have vagrant boxes and AMIs for every possible use case.
That said, depending of your infra and knowledge, people might want to go to rpm based linux distros (redhat/centos) or other a little bit more exotic. All linux distros have advantages and disadvantages. Pick yours.
Coming from a background of huge tomcat/jetty applications, I can certainly tell you this: the containers themselves have differences in performance, but windows performs much worse than a linux app for the same container/java. It’s not important when you don’t have a lot of load. This was true for both machines in VMware and in EC2land.
In theory it should always work everywhere, practice tells me that openjdk will bring different bugs of oracle jdk, and the same can happen in windows/linux jdks. Not very common, you might not find it never because you didn’t have enough exposure, but I’ve seen a couple.
And doing provision/automation in windows is particularly challenging.
For my non-server systems, I switched from Ubuntu to Fedora Workstation for the most part this year and have been very pleased.
For various reasons, I’d still probably stick with Ubuntu LTS for servers.