I have a home windows server I setup ages ago. Installed windows server 2012 r2 essentials (got the license through school) and it's been my NAS/workhorse for 10+ years now... It runs my stablebit ...
I don't really see a reason to use Windows Server for anything. You can do Active Directory for Windows clients using Samba on a RHEL based Linux distro. I might be wrong, but I think you can even do ...