I'm looking at doing the same, although not sure whether I should try for Server 2019 and risk being on the bleeding edge. Can you elaborate at all on the sort of things you had to install manually and get set up? Was it intuitive to do, i.e. the Logix installer would say "I can't install until you install X Y and Z", or did it just fail to install and you had to trawl through the install log to work out what was missing? Any particular gotchas that you encountered?
sorry for the late reply.
the things that needed to be manually done were prompted to me to have to be done by the AB installers. I think it was something to do with the NET Framework 3.5 perhaps. Looking through my YouTube history I watched "How to Install NET 3.5 Framework in Windows Server 2012 R2", but again i didnt know that had to be done until trying to install, i believe Studio 5000, and it stopped the install to say that I needed this .NET to be installed. as far as a license key, eBay has em. maybe thats not the right way to go about things, but thats the way we've done it. you can get the .iso for Server off of Microsofts website and run it for like 180 days as a trial, then once you get the license you can activate it by doing some command prompt stuff. again a quick google search will bring you exactly what you need.