Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Moving To Per-Core Licensing (arstechnica.com)

rbrandis writes: Windows Server 2012 has two main editions, Standard and Datacenter. They had identical features, and differed only in terms of the number of virtual operating system instances they supported. The licenses for both editions were sold in two-socket units; one license was needed for each pair of sockets a system contained.

Windows Server 2016 reinstates the functional differences between Standard and Datacenter editions. Datacenter will include additional storage replication capabilities, a new network stack with richer virtualization options, and shielded virtual machines that protect the content of a virtual machine from the administrator of the host operating system. These features won't be found in the Standard edition.

Windows Server 2016 licensing moves to a per core model. Instead of 2012's two socket license pack, 2016 will use a 2-core pack, with the license cost of each 2016 pack being 1/8th the price of the corresponding 2 socket pack for 2012. Each system running Windows Server 2016 must have a minimum of 8 cores (4 packs) per processor, and a minimum of 16 cores (8 packs) per system.

Comments

It's almost like a fetish

[ZorinLynx]

Microsoft seems to have a fetish for making licensing complicated.

I suppose since they practically invented the concept it makes sense. But damn, how far can it go?

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[BarbaraHudson]

Microsoft seems to have a fetish for making licensing complicated.

I suppose since they practically invented the concept it makes sense. But damn, how far can it go?

They didn't invent the concept. They're just following in the footsteps of Oracle, IBM, etc.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[smittyoneeach]

Jeff Bezos is all: "Hey. You. Get off of my cloud."

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should Microsoft care if their licensing is complicated? The businesses that let themselves get locked-in to that proprietary dungeon have nowhere to go.

Dominatrix analogy: When you're locked up in shackles and your dom says lick my boot, well, you don't have much choice but to say "yes master!" and lick their boot. HTH.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[ArylAkamov]

Microsoft seems to have a fetish for making licensing complicated.

No kidding. I still remember flipping my shit in school when I learned about server CALs.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Microsoft was knee-high to a grasshopper and might not have even yet been in the business of selling word processors to Mac users and a cheapo 'disk operating system' for 8086s back wehn IBM was already making licensing complicated.

They've certainly grown up since then, though.

I have no doubt that they'll make this change confusing, just because they always do, but the move from per-socket to per-core seems like it should come as basically no surprise from MS, or anyone else selling software whose scale is limited primarily by the power of the underlying system, rather than 'per user' or 'per seat': The number of cores, and amount of supported RAM, per socket has just skyrocketed lately, even for comparatively modest sums of money, while the sheer board complexity and need for fancy high-speed interconnect has kept socket counts relatively flat(the plummeting costs of computer equipment in general means that team supercomputer-with-custom-interconnect-fabric is still buying more sockets than ever; but among cost-sensitive customers I wouldn't be at all surprised if 8-socket systems are getting hammered, and 4 sockets dead in the water or even declining, as the number of cores you can cram into 1 or 2 socket systems increases).

On the minus side, this can't be good news for AMD: their per-core performance is lagging; but they have some parts that are kept somewhere in the running because they offer a lot of (fairly slow) cores, and support a lot of RAM, for a relatively low price(it's not terribly glamorous; but there are applications where you have a zillion lightweight http server tasks, or need a big huge memcached server for cheap and single threaded performance matters less than price). If MS is licensing per-core, without any modifiers for the power of the cores, that is going to put a great deal of emphasis on high per-core performance in any environment that tithes to Redmond. In their ideal world, they'd obviously just have a more competitive design; but AMD can't be happy that MS isn't 'weighting' cores for licensing purposes.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[techno-vampire]

You must have a very, very strange Dominatrix. The word you use is the feminine form of Dominator, and I'd expect that the correct response would be, "Yes, Mistress," unless you wanted to give her an excuse to punish you.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[Opportunist]

Simple. So people shit their pants when the bullshit software alliance comes knocking and instead of telling them to shove it bend over because they fear their licensing isn't in order, simply 'cause tax laws are easier to follow and heed.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[unixisc]

I guess the Rolling Stones could use a new member - ain't all their original members dead?

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[mlts]

Here is the ironic thing. IBM with POWER7 has two modes for their chips. One is the usual functionality, where a 32 core CPU uses all 32 cores. The second mode, called TurboCore, disables half the cores... but allows the cores that are working to use the cache of their disabled neighbors, as well as run the CPU at a higher clock rate.

The reason for this mode is because Oracle, Sybase, et. al., all have per core licensing for production systems. So, having the ability to turn off a good amount of cores will cut the fee in half, and that licensing fee can be very substantial.

One advantage of Microsoft was that they licensed per CPU socket. Now, in Windows Server 2016, that changes... and I'm not surprised it did, just because of the amount of cores available on Xeons and AMD CPU chips.

Maybe this is a good thing. Customers will demand that Intel and AMD start having more oomph per core than just adding more cores to the die. This will help a lot in tasks that can't be multithreaded (fast fourier transforms if doing video, for example.) Maybe we will see the IBM TurboCore mode (not to be confused with AMD's TurboCore) used in the amd64 architecture.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

A small hosting company I know almost went bankrupt when they got too many cals for a client that then left, crazy cost.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[slazzy]

I think the fetish analogy should be the financial domination fetish.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

They can demand "more oomph per core" all they like. It's not like Intel, AMD, IBM, or anyone else can really deliver on that promise. Intel and IBM have already resigned themselves to spreading out unutilized resources between multiple threads via SMT, and AMD is following suit in 2016 (Zen/Summit Ridge).

Software vendors are doing this to make bank on 1-2p systems with tons of cores instead of the 4-8p systems that are becoming less common.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[Zero__Kelvin]

"Maybe this is a good thing. Customers will demand that Intel and AMD start having more oomph per core than just adding more cores to the die"

Not sure why you think removing choices and tying the hands of developers is a good thing .

Licensing per core is stupid, and frankly it should be illegal. What's next, different cost based on the amount of RAM installed? Higher cost if you haver a SATA 6 capable drive rather than SATA 3?

Microsoft: You seem to have upgraded your ISP plan and have 10 times the network throughput now. Please remit US $500.00 in order to continue using this added functionality.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD's CMT-based architectures have been officially EoLed. They're done, finished, finito, no more. The last one you'll see is Bristol Ridge on the desktop. Zen is taking over their server/workstation/HEDT lineup. It remains to be seen how functional will be their implementation of SMT.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

Licensing per core is stupid, and frankly it should be illegal.

Why illegal? There is already licensing per user. So why not per core? Why not per watt?

There is an alternative - use a competitor that uses a more palatable licensing scheme.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[Mashiki]

This isn't even close to being complicated. MS was doing per-core licensing back when WindowsNT 3.1 was a thing.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[Zero__Kelvin]

They didn't provide any added benefit (unless you count removing artificial crippling of the software as an "added benefit"), and furthermore there is a high probability that if I have 32 cores they will be charging me a ridiculous fee for code that likely doesn't (and can't) take advantage of that kind of parallelism.

"There is an alternative - use a competitor that uses a more palatable licensing scheme."

Unfortunately that is not always an option. There are myriad reasons why, and while in many cases it is the fault of the consumer for choosing vendor lock-in despite repeated warnings to avoid it, in many other cases someone who would never make such a mistake inherited it from someone who did. Indeed, for a few niche cases vendor lock-in was the only viable choice.

In many cases, of course, they can migrate, and at this point those people who don't do so are either crazy, idiots, or both.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

They sued us and put us out of business despite paying all of their license fees.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

Those Microsoft Republicans want us to die. They raped me with rebar when I worked there.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

That is the way of Microsoft.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

They required we bounce the last paycheck to our employee.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

They hate thefact employees are paid.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

Licensing per core is stupid, and frankly it should be illegal.

Why illegal? There is already licensing per user. So why not per core? Why not per watt?

They didn't provide any added benefit (unless you count removing artificial crippling of the software as an "added benefit"), and furthermore there is a high probability that if I have 32 cores they will be charging me a ridiculous fee for code that likely doesn't (and can't) take advantage of that kind of parallelism.

And before GP chimes in and says "so what, you agreed to the license!", a contract can be invalidated for being one-sided. If the license says you pay more money "because FU, that's why" then the contract seems a little one sided.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

They hate workers.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

For us, they required we transfer everything we could out of our employees account. Yes your direct deposit means your employer can transfer money out of your account.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

They required us to try to transfer back our last paycheck a to employees.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft hates people that work for a living.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

I lost three months pay becuz of Microsoft.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[jaa101]

Customers will demand that Intel and AMD start having more oomph per core than just adding more cores to the die.

Intel and AMD would love to be able to do that. We haven't been stalled under 4GHz for years for marketing reasons; it's just not possible with current technology and sane power dissipation.

This will help a lot in tasks that can't be multithreaded (fast fourier transforms if doing video, for example.)

For video work its usually possible to parallelise by just having each core work on its own frame. Anyway, there seems to be plenty of literature on multithreaded FFT algorithms.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft required we take bake five months of pay.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft required us to take as much as we could from employees to give to them.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft made us transfer money out of employee accounts.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

For me, it was seven months.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsofrft require do we starved the children of employees to death.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

Az iz dey way way of dhere kind.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Z00L00K]

They did learn from Oracle.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

Hate iz not strong enough. For us, they demanded to know how many babies we killed.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[armanox]

Or have no choice in the matter. Remember, the people that make the decisions on HW/SW are not always the ones who know the fine details.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

They wrote me a letter saying Gates wuz happy my daughter starved to death.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

And dey constantly killz children.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[Dog-Cow]

There were no multi-core x86 processors when 3.1 was a thing.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

When my daughter died Gates said he was happy she died so I could concentrate on work.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

When my three year-old son died, Gates said he was happy since I could spend more time at work.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

And Gates wuz happy when my daughter died.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

Dat iz dey way of dere kind.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

Dat uz how dey B.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

And like all Repukians; they want us Ll 2 Die.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

Like my wife that bled to death after being raised at Microsoft.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

Be cuz dey r paid.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

They won't to outlaw paying emplooyees.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

They also want to outlaw not being a victim.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[hughbar]

Absolutely. I'm in my 60's now, and remember that IBM had a grip on the mainframe market renting expensive extra memory for each bit of bloated software (sound familiar?). All the manufacturers were mutually incompatible too until Amdahl and the plug-compatibles arrived, this and the IBM anti-trust finished the game.

Second, (I believe) they invented functional pricing, something that was enthusiastically adopted by ICL (the British manufacturer), a 300 line per minute printer is the same hardware-wise as a 600 lpm, except for one resistor (say) and the rental price.

So Gates had some good teachers, as do Apple (incompatibility and difficulty of repair, but oh-so-shiny), Android (what use are 'apps', except for customer/data capture?) etc. etc. Linux, BSD are pieces of serious 'liberation', it would be well to appreciate that. Happy whatever.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

Which iz not pissible considering g how dey flood de streets wid gunz.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

As they did me.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

Becuz dy pigz.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

Becuz dat iz dey way off bill Gatz.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

They can take the right to ru. microsorneatey.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

I scan smell ur thoughts but.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[Gumbercules!!]

True, if you call two people from Microsoft licensing for an answer you'll get three answers. And none of them will overlap.

Given the explosion of corse on a processor, I'm not inherently against the concept of charging by core - as long as the price is reasonable. From what I can see elsewhere on line, however, it doesn't look reasonable.

Also, only including storage replicas in Datacentre was a huge mistake that will basically kill any chance Microsoft had of getting into storage.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[jandersen]

Well, to be fair, we have had this in Linux from the start: it costs $0 for 1 core, twice as much for two etc.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

Dat uz how dey B.

It is I don't understand why so many people support the Microsoft rapists.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[arglebargle_xiv]

Microsoft seems to have a fetish for making licensing complicated.

They didn't invent the concept. They're just following in the footsteps of Oracle, IBM, etc.

I was thinking the same thing, in terms of insanity-inducing licensing complexity Oracle is hard to beat. Haven't dealt with IBM much, but Lenovo's ThinkPad licensing, presumably IBM-derived, is a nightmare too, try buying an extended warranty from them and see if you can figure out which of the dozen nearly identically-named versions with little to no apparent difference apart from price you need.

Still, nothing comes close to Oracle when it comes to incomprehensible licensing.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[arglebargle_xiv]

Someone I know is a satanist. He sent a copy of Oracle's license docs down to hell with a note attached saying "Guys, learn".

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[Rockoon]

This will help a lot in tasks that can't be multithreaded (fast fourier transforms if doing video, for example.)

There have been parallel FFT's algorithms for years that scale fairly well, especially for multi-dimensional data (3D transforms get an almost a linear scaling with core count.) What the hell are you talking about?

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[war4peace]

What's next, different cost based on the amount of RAM installed?

This already exists. Some MS Operating Systems artificially support limited amounts of memory.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[cyber-vandal]

I've seen people tearing their hair out over SQL Server licensing. They tried to get an explanation from Microsoft and even they couldn't explain it. The thing that a lot of inexperienced people here don't realise is that it's incredibly expensive either way and it's a lot easier and less of a business risk to just keep paying the devil you know than to completely rewrite your core systems. If you've got other Microsoft software such as Dynamics or SharePoint then you're basically trapped forever.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the parent poster was off track with his FFT claim, but he could have omitted the example and his post is still 100% valid. There are *many* tasks that cannot be parallelised effectively, and there are many more that can't be parallelised in practice because few software houses have star PhD-level CS graduates on their books to develop and implement them.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[QA]

You must not have very much experience with IBM DB2 scenarios......When I upgraded to 256GB in my DB2 server I had to buy a license upgrade to utilize the RAM. Prior to that I had to upgrade the license to use all 16 cores in that server.

Not only do you pay the extra licensing fee, but a percentage is tacked on to the annual support cost. I think it was 16% more in my case.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the NT4 era it was "per seat" licencing, and just a number you entered. There was no licence verification what-so-ever. And because nobody gave a care, those that installed it just put 9999 or whatever number they pulled out of their butt.

See the problem is "per core" licensing only makes sense if the OS is running virtualized copies of itself (eg Windows on Windows.) Run something else like FreeBSD, Linux, or even MacOS X (on Mac Hardware) and it stops making sense, since it's essentially identical to Windows 7 and 10.

At any rate, stuff like this is why BSD or Linux based systems flourish, because Microsoft's licencing doesn't make any kind of sense for web-facing applications, and only for two specific sets (database and network file system) is there any kind of logical reason to even have it. Databases scale by number of cores, while network file systems scale by attached devices and network physical layers used.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft seems to have a fetish for making licensing complicated.

I suppose since they practically invented the concept it makes sense. But damn, how far can it go?

They didn't invent the concept. They're just following in the footsteps of Oracle, IBM, etc.

Humans copying other Humans? Get outta here!
Wait, really?

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[poofmeisterp]

"Maybe this is a good thing. Customers will demand that Intel and AMD start having more oomph per core than just adding more cores to the die"

Not sure why you think removing choices and tying the hands of developers is a good thing .

Licensing per core is stupid, and frankly it should be illegal. What's next, different cost based on the amount of RAM installed? Higher cost if you haver a SATA 6 capable drive rather than SATA 3?

  Microsoft: You seem to have upgraded your ISP plan and have 10 times the network throughput now. Please remit US $500.00 in order to continue using this added functionality.

Start licensing by each illegal activity's operation, by operation, performed on any core in a working IPC system. Get the popcorn ready....

You just launched uTorrent and downloaded S1E1 of Gilligan's Island (SD, low res). To continue using Windows, please have your credit card or checking account number ready (along with business unit), and click Next-> to pay the $32,080,102,443,390 Windows license cost.

(I estimate, of course)

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[unixisc]

Nor many SMP x86 systems. The few that were there were from a few niche companies such as Sequent. Even the RISC platforms for NT - MIPS and Alpha - were uniprocessing systems.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[Alioth]

Oracle's licensing is particularly pathological. The problem is you ask five Oracle resellers for a quote, giving them identical hardware specs and requirements, and you'll get five different prices for licensing starting from eyewateringly expensive to absurd.

The trouble is if you pick the wrong one, Oracle will turn around and sue you later. Now most vendors won't sue their customers because it makes for bad business, but in the case of Oracle this isn't so. If you're going to spend the money on Oracle, your developers aren't just going to use what's merely in the SQL standard, to make full use of this very expensive asset they are going to have to use many Oracle-specific features. This results in a level of lock-in that exceeds Microsoft's wildest dreams. So Oracle can decide you're not licensed properly then sue you knowing you can't say "Well fine, we'll switch to some other database", and that you'll have to pay the penalties then the new seemingly arbitrary price that Oracle demands. Your only option is to try and sue the VAR who sold you the licensing scheme and said it was correct. (This just happened recently to an organization here).

We narrowly avoided needing Oracle (a dependency a project had thanks to some 3rd party software). I think the fact that Oracle was suing this other organization helped make the finance people listen to reason and kill the project.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM actually does that. Has been doing it for years. Standard licencing practice. Suck as much money from the client as possible.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you made the decision to use oracle I feel no pity for you. If your boss made that decision, may God be with you.

Seriously this pricing is absurd. It's extortion pretty much. "Nice cores you have there, shame you can't use them"

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

Meant IBM not oracle, sorry.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[sribe]

What the hell are you talking about?

Seems to be a common meme lately, to talk about the vast amount of tasks which cannot be parallelized. One sees it particularly around discussions of mobile processors for phones & tablets--the claim is made again & again that mobile devices cannot benefit much from higher core counts, totally ignoring that the most CPU-intensive, and extremely common, tasks we do with these things are processing of photos and videos, which are extremely amenable to parallel algorithms--in fact, the built-in libraries for such things are almost certainly highly parallel, which means that pretty much any developer working with those data types will be using parallel implementations.

Oh well...

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[hawk]

So?

640k should be good enough for anybody! :)

hawk

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[UnknownSoldier]

> What's next, different cost based on the amount of RAM installed?

MS already does that with Windows 7 (or previous versions)

I have 32 GB of RAM in my main dev box. You need to run Windows 7 Professional (or better) in order to use more then 16 GB of RAM. You need to use Windows 7 Premium or better if you have more then 8 GB RAM.

Memory Limits for Windows and Windows Server Releases
* https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-...

e.g. x64 version
Windows 7 Professional 192 GB
Windows 7 Home Premium 16 GB
Windows 7 Home Basic 8 GB

Note: For Windows 8 and Windows 10 MS removed almost all of these silly limits.

i.e.
Windows 10 Enterprise 2TB
Windows 10 Education 2TB
Windows 10 Pro 2TB
Windows 10 Home 128GB

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[Anne Thwacks]

I recommend avoiding this scam: the *BSDs are a good functional replacement a snip at: $0 for the first core, and HALF PRICE for each additional core!

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[Lumpy]

They used to do this. I remember buying Processor licenses for Windows NT.

Microsoft is good at doing the same things over and over again.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you acting so entitled to someone else's software? Microsoft makes Windows Server, and they can license it however they want, for as much as they want. They don't have a monopoly in the server market, so you really don't have a case for getting the government involved in their pricing here.

Segmentation is good anyhow. It means that consumers and small businesses--who just want a server OS for their commodity PC parts--pay a low price, while big corporations and governments running Windows on beefy servers in datacenters and clusters pay a higher price. One of the great things about this is that hobbyists, researchers, and entrepreneurs get a great bargain on the same technology used by the big boys.

Everyone does this. Intel i7s are basically Xeons with support for error-correcting RAM disabled. Nvidia GeForce chips are basically Quadros with a different firmware.

Re: It's almost like a fetish

[mSparks43]

[blockquote]Licensing per core is stupid[/blockquote]

but not quite as stupid as using Microsoft server in the first place.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

SMP is not a synonym for multi-processor. Compaq (the first company to ever make an IBM clone computer and one of the largest hardware vendors at the time) was not a niche company! It released the SystemPro in 1989 and NT 3.1 didn't roll around until 1993.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[ranton]

And before GP chimes in and says "so what, you agreed to the license!", a contract can be invalidated for being one-sided. If the license says you pay more money "because FU, that's why" then the contract seems a little one sided.

I find it hard to believe someone could argue these license changes constitute an unconscionable contract. I could see it happening for an end user agreement when one party is a corporation and the other is a standard customer. But in this case both sides are professionals. Microsoft isn't picking on some old lady who doesn't know what they are doing. Anyone purchasing Windows Server 2016 for servers costing tens of thousands of dollars should know what they are doing. And since Windows will be offering extended support for Server 2012 for close to another decade, no one is forcing anyone to upgrade.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[ranton]

Unfortunately that is not always an option. There are myriad reasons why, and while in many cases it is the fault of the consumer for choosing vendor lock-in despite repeated warnings to avoid it, in many other cases someone who would never make such a mistake inherited it from someone who did. Indeed, for a few niche cases vendor lock-in was the only viable choice.

In many cases, of course, they can migrate, and at this point those people who don't do so are either crazy, idiots, or both.

Yes, using a competitor is ALWAYS an option at the time scales which are relevant here. Companies can continue to use Windows Server 2012 for about another decade. Anyone who cannot remove vendor lock in over a decade is willingly ignoring the problem, and willfully accepting whatever license changes Microsoft is making because they don't feel like going with another option. There may be companies whose IT departments do move this slow, but that is their choice. They could move faster if they were motivated to.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[J Story]

I'm sure this is an ongoing issue, but given that FOSS database alternatives are available, can you tell us where it is that DB/2 (and presumably Oracle, etc.) vastly outclasses these alternatives to the extent that your company is willing to pay serious coin to use? Is Postgres, for example, simply unable to keep up with high throughput demands?

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[J Story]

Someone I know is a satanist. He sent a copy of Oracle's license docs down to hell with a note attached saying "Guys, learn".

A reference to Pratchett/Gaiman's 'Good Omens', btw, and essential reading.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[arglebargle_xiv]

Definitely! RIP Pterry.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[darkain]

"What's next, different cost based on the amount of RAM installed?"

VMWare has been doing this for years, actually! They're ahead of the game!

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[Rob Y.]

Multiple cores is really just a substitute for faster processors. You're still running a single OS on them, and that OS could multitask pretty much as well on a single core that was twice as fast as on a dual core machine. So, they're essentially using the number of cores as a proxy for the power of the machine. Did they charge more for high clock speed servers back in the single core days?

I can see a point for charging by the VM - in which case you're using the souped up hardware to run multiple copies of the OS, so to use a single license would be kind of cheating.

Meanwhile, why does anybody pay for this? Seriously. Okay, if you're hosting Exchange or Sharepoint, well you bought into it. Or if you built an in-house system bassed on SQLServer. But for anything else, the free alternatives are just as good.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

300 line per minute printer is the same hardware-wise as a 600 lpm, except for one resistor (say) and the rental price.

It's the turning of hardware business into a service business at work. Marketing services should be more volatile effort than marketing tangible products. Perhaps this is a way to explain market losses for the stockholders, as the competition materialized: "We are in the service market, and as you all know marketing services is not as measurable and controllable process than that of tangibles."

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[Mashiki]

Right there were physical processors, and per-core licensing was a thing even then. Back way in the 90's as you should remember, each processor was considered an individual core.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[Grishnakh]

Hopefully, it'll go really, really, really far. They should make their licensing as ridiculously and byzantinely complicated as possible, and then have draconian penalties for customers found to be out of compliance. They should also have routine, highly disruptive audits of customers to ensure compliance and assess ridiculous penalties for breaches.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[Grishnakh]

Licensing per core is stupid, and frankly it should be illegal. What's next, different cost based on the amount of RAM installed? Higher cost if you haver a SATA 6 capable drive rather than SATA 3?

No, it shouldn't be illegal at all. What a stupid thing to say. Why should it be illegal? If you don't like it, then don't buy from that vendor.

Yes, I'd be happy to see them charge based on RAM, or SATA6 or whatever. I'd also like to see vendors like Microsoft and Oracle require customers to submit to surprise audits, which can happen at any time, no matter how disruptive to customer operations, and pay huge sums of money on the spot for any licensing violations found.

Again, if you don't like this, it's really simple: don't become customers of these companies.

Companies should have every right to treat their customers worse than dog shit. If customers continue to buy from these companies, then these customers deserve that treatment.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[Grishnakh]

So what? If you're some IT worker who knows "the fine details", then why would you give a shit about how much the licensing costs or that the company is getting screwed? It's not your money. Just do your job and collect your paycheck. If the company goes under because the decision-makers are idiots, go find another job.

Everyone has choice in the matter. The decision makers choose the vendor and agree to the contracts. The company owners choose the decision-makers. The IT workers have a choice whether to work there or not, or whether to go look for another job elsewhere.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[Zero__Kelvin]

"No, it shouldn't be illegal at all. What a stupid thing to say. Why should it be illegal?"

I would try to explain it to you, but you have made it abundantly clear that you are far too stupid to understand. Bottom line fact: if you are a trump supporter, then you are ignorant, a moron, or most likely, both. (And yes I said fact, not opinion)

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[Muad'Dave]

That must've been the same 300/600LPI printer that was sold with the "Perkin-Elmer" or "Concurrent Computer" badge on it. Was it a tractor-fed band printer from the 80's?

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[Muad'Dave]

I had a 2 socket Pentium 233 MMX Motherboard way back in the day (199x). I ran SETI on it and reported back to the mother ship over an ISDN line. Really racked up those work units.

Re:It's almost like a fetish

[hughbar]

Sorry, only just saw this, it was tractor fed from the mid 70s probably into the 80s. ICL branded.

Cores? Packs? Sockets?

[Walter White]

What do these mean?

Re:Cores? Packs? Sockets?

[Anonymous Coward]

They mean you should run your infrastructure and business-critical services on Linux or BSD so that Microsoft can't hold your entire company hostage at will.

Re:Cores? Packs? Sockets?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cores: the number of compute cores available. I think this is pretty clear. IE from a 4 core or 8 core processor, etc.
Packs: a license pack for running the OS on 2 cores. Additional license packs are needed for additional pair of cores.
Sockets: the number of physical processor chips installed. Literally the number of CPU sockets (eg: LGA 1151) that are filled with a processor.

Re:Cores? Packs? Sockets?

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Sure. When your system is hacked into because you misconfigured something because it was so fucking confusing that even Linus couldn't set it up correctly and you lose your job ... that'll show big mean Microsoft.

Yes...thank goodness Microsoft servers are impervious to hacking or misconfiguration.

Re:Cores? Packs? Sockets?

[Anonymous Coward]

The same thing is a risk on Windows. Competency is required on either OS.

Re:Cores? Packs? Sockets?

[unixisc]

Isn't cores the number of CPUs in a single package? And the sockets the number of packages that can be there? In other words

Total number of cores = Number of cores/package x Number of populated sockets

In other words, they would charge as per the number of CPUs in the entire system, right?

Re:Cores? Packs? Sockets?

[unixisc]

They mean you should run your infrastructure and business-critical services on Linux or BSD so that Microsoft can't hold your entire company hostage at will.

I fully second this. While I've had my reservations about the redistribution rights automatically granted to FOSS, one thing that's always rubbed me the wrong way is an ISV either restricting the customer in terms of the number of installations, pretending that the software is a book, or dinging the customer higher if the customer has more processing power.

With these sort of trends, I do hope that people migrate to Linux or the BSDs so that they can get as powerful hardware as they can afford w/o having to worry about paying thru the nose for additional OS licenses.

Re:Cores? Packs? Sockets?

[hairyfeet]

With Windows if you are good at running say a Win2K server? Its really not hard to pick up Server 2K12, the underlying guts and conventions with WinServer really don't change much from what I've seen. That USED TO BE the same with Linux, but now you have the snarling hydra that is SystemD gobbling up functions left and right.

I really wish it weren't true but it does hold true to my theory that MSFT never has to worry because the biggest threat to Linux is its devs and NIH syndrome. Hell look at what happened when MSFT put out the Vista Bomb, you had the major DEs throw out years worth of work for bug ridden alpha quality code that every distro instantly made default, Windows 8? Larry Potter and the Pulsing Puking Audio, I swear if I didn't know better I'd think Linux was run by a bunch of devs from Bizzaro who sit around saying things like "Oh No, things am stable and everything is working, this will make things too easy! We must break critical drivers and subsystems with am patch and replace well written system with alpha code, then users will feel they am leet for getting it running half as good as it did and we get fat support contracts...aren't me am smart?"

Re:Cores? Packs? Sockets?

[Anonymous Coward]

Annh *shrug*

My job is keeping the software running and the file shares available. I may make suggestions based upon security issues but by no means do I offer to provide server hardening or other security services. That costs extra and goes to a different department. Windows, Linux, Mac, BSD, whatever. I keep the software running and someone else (trained in it) handles security. Doesn't matter to me what OS you run on it.

Re:Cores? Packs? Sockets?

[armanox]

Agreed. Linux used to be simple. It used to be stable. It used to 'just work.' Now, I no longer tell people to use Linux. I tell them to buy something - Windows if they need something basic, or buy a real UNIX if they need it (nothing against the *BSDs, but software/driver support isn't there right now). My home servers are running Solaris and IRIX, because they both work (and I have the SPARC/MIPS hardware) without issues. Systemd wishes it could be launchd or SMF, but it's not. PulseAudio took years to stabilize, while Solaris 10 ran fine for me with OSS. And for the business world, while I like supporting Open Source projects (I've donated time, money, and code in the past), having things actually work is far more important.

Re:Cores? Packs? Sockets?

[aaarrrgggh]

Sadly, it seems like the opposite will happen, at least from my perspective with traditional office servers. We will migrate from a 90% Linux environment to a 100% Windows environment because of shortcomings in samba. It just isn't worth the pain anymore.

Re:Cores? Packs? Sockets?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except there is no good alternative to Active Directory. AD offers system, network, and user management in a unified system. Cobbling together an OSS alternative is more complex and not nearly an as effective. A couple Samba shares and OpenLDAP do not even approach what AD does.

Microsoft knows how to make an integrated environment that works. OSS does not.

Re: Cores? Packs? Sockets?

[buchanmilne]

You mean Microsoft knows how to make management of their desktop OS only work well with their server software.

What if you aren't running windows desktops?

Re:Cores? Packs? Sockets?

[Anonymous Coward]

Old religious gripes are old. The stuff works and they support it. Professionals move on.

Re:Cores? Packs? Sockets?

[Z00L00K]

As long as you stay off systemd the risk is low.

Re:Cores? Packs? Sockets?

[Z00L00K]

Especially since the amount of hidden features in Windows is large and the log files don't tell you anything it's easy to create security problems.

Re:Cores? Packs? Sockets?

[rl117]

I did move on... to FreeBSD.

The behaviour of RedHat and Ubuntu and others for the last few years has appeared to be a kind of replay of the Unix wars of the '80s and '90s. A major factor in the rise of Linux. Vendor-specific programs and tools, or vendor-specific modifications of existing libraries and programs to lock you in (or preventing patches to add such being refused, which is the same thing in reverse). upstart, systemd, appindicators (and the games by upstream GNOME). There's plenty more besides. Intentions aside, these have all served to disrupt and fragment the Linux ecosystem, and have not done anything to help its long-term adoption and survival.

Re:Cores? Packs? Sockets?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the stuff you are running on Windows server is so serious that you need 8 cores, it's probably a good idea to consider an operating system with more predictable licensing terms.

Re: Cores? Packs? Sockets?

[Anonymous Coward]

I gave up on managing Windows desktops. (net)Boot in Linux, blast a new compressed windows disk image over the network to the client SSD in a couple of minutes. problem solved.
Securing a windows desktop is impossible, even with Windows servers, so we are following the example by SpaceX, and disable desktop internet access, run browsers on fresh Linux image on a virtual machine on the server, and only send a screen-cast of that browser to the client. Any files downloaded in the browser are put in quarantine, and after sufficient scanning and white-listing, made available on the network.
I simply don't have the time to work with "solutions" that reduce problems instead of 100% fixing them.

Re:Cores? Packs? Sockets?

[Kjella]

Larry Potter and the Pulsing Puking Audio, I swear if I didn't know better I'd think Linux was run by a bunch of devs from Bizzaro who sit around saying things like "Oh No, things am stable and everything is working, this will make things too easy! We must break critical drivers and subsystems with am patch and replace well written system with alpha code, then users will feel they am leet for getting it running half as good as it did and we get fat support contracts...aren't me am smart?"

I don't think you have to go there, this is basically one of the downsides of a "do-ocracy". In some form it's almost inevitable because the participants are the de facto agents of change and there's a lot of armchair quarterbacks that want to direct the project to serve their needs and like 4chan would say it's not "your personal army". But it means that the system is heavily tilted towards those who want to write code, even if it's for a very marginal use case and mucking with stable and working code. Essentially all you have to do to break the system is get the buy-in from other developers who also often want to break the system in their own way, the inmates deciding how to run the asylum if you will. Those who "just" use and depend on the functionality of the project doesn't have a direct say in the matter.

The primary resistance to this is some form of meritocracy or quality standards, so that bad ideas and bad code are weeded out. Unfortunately that means that somebody or someone has to decide what has "merit" and what is "good" code or not, with all the problems that entails. The most extreme form is probably having a BDFL (benevolent dictator for life) and rules that are almost carved in stone like "Thou shalt not break userspace", you might argue it has its downsides but it has certainly led to some very successful projects too. Unfortunately it works equally well - or poorly if you will - in reverse, if the wrong person gets in power supported by his cronies the opposition can be slowly weeded out of the project until they control a critical piece of infrastructure and everyone else comes along for the ride.

Open source fan(atic)s that don't want to admit this is a problem often say you can just fork it, but that ignores the momentum and interdependencies of a large project. There's a reason that some form of "divide and conquer" is a centerpiece in every psychopath and tyrant's playbook, as long as there is no clear alternative to rally around that can convert the silent majority of developers and upstream/downstream projects then both developers and users will adapt, from begrudgingly accepting it to finding an alternative and leaving. Which is not entirely unlike what happens with proprietary software, if things get bad enough you dump it for a competitor but there's obvious costs in lock-in, familiarity, re-training and so on. It's not free, not even if the alternative is free as in beer and in speech.

Re:Cores? Packs? Sockets?

[rubycodez]

systemd doesn't work, we have the misfortune of having a few servers with that and they do weird things, like rolling back to the initial boot state on certain errors. what a bunch of garbage. professionals avoid that which doesn't work, and design and build robust systems

Re:Cores? Packs? Sockets?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you don't use systemd but you used PulseAudio once and systemd must have a similar design, coding style, goals, implementation, and problems.

Systemd is stable. The only thing that needs to change is for the haters to retire to someplace where they can write an init script to kick the kids off their lawn and leave the rest of us in peace.

Re:Cores? Packs? Sockets?

[LVSlushdat]

Oh how I wish I had mod points to mod you up.... I retired in 2010 after using/supporting Windows and Linux since the mid 90s.. I decided when I retired I was done with MS products on my home network, and now, after seeing the privacy nightmare that *is* Windows 10, I see I made the correct decision. I strongly believe that Redhat is *trying* to fuck up the Linux ecosystem with the idiotic crap their employees create and then dump on other distros.. I couldn't care less how much they fuck up Redhat (and its compatibles) with their garbage (listed above by armanox), but when they manage to fuck up my favorite distro, Debian, I get PISSED...

Re: Cores? Packs? Sockets?

[Anonymous Coward]

It works just fine. At work we have a number of Linux and Mac OS X systems that integrate wonderfully. LDAP, Kerberos, and file sharing work without a hitch.

Re:Cores? Packs? Sockets?

[unixisc]

Try out PC-BSD

Microsoft Windows is for Cows

[Anonymous Coward]

You are all Cows. Cows say BSOD. BSOD. BSOD Cows BSOD. BSOD say the Cows. YOU CLIPPY COWS!!!

Re:Microsoft Windows is for Cows

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, Sexconker, I'll give that one to you. That was funny. Too bad you're such an utter asshole elsewhere, really...

So I Have To Have A Dual Socket Server?

[zenlessyank]

Just to run 2016 WinServer? Hmmmm.

Re:So I Have To Have A Dual Socket Server?

[randm.ca]

Don't be silly, of course MS won't require you to have a dual socket server just to run Windows Server 2016. They're only going to make you pay as if you have one!

Re:So I Have To Have A Dual Socket Server?

[zenlessyank]

Oh. Cool. I was worried there for a .....hey, wait a minute.

Re:So I Have To Have A Dual Socket Server?

[yakatz]

No, you don't need two sockets, you need to pay for two sockets even if you only use one.
This is specifically addressed in their FAQ (Q7): https://docs.google.com/viewer...

Re:So I Have To Have A Dual Socket Server?

[zenlessyank]

Actually, I just need that new shiny 8 core Xeon. All is well. I hope Fallout 4 likes 16 threads because I can't be the only person using Windows Server for their desktop OS. 2008r2 is showing its age on this Athlon X3 chip.

Re:So I Have To Have A Dual Socket Server?

[mlts]

W2008R2 isn't bad for a desktop OS, if only because wbadmin (the included backup program) isn't the gutted POS it is on the client editions. It actually is comparable to Time Machine for doing decent backups.

Windows Server 2016 will be a nice desktop OS. Even though you don't have an option for a GUI shell upon install, it is easily added as a feature, and the telemetry stuff isn't present unless you explicitly add Cortana and other gewgaws.

Re:So I Have To Have A Dual Socket Server?

[Billly Gates]

That is not recommended. The quantum for the threading is set for server loads at the expense of faster performance with fewer threads. Server is tuned to running many many loads over faster smaller loads.

I see no reason to run server at all for a home OS. I use VMware and Hyper-V which is free with the pro version of Windows 8.1 to learn server, Linux, and pfSense FreeBSD routers, and run lamp stack appliances if I need something heavy duty. It is 2015 and not 2000 where you load everything you possibly need and configure one box for the master of all. Virtualization is even free if you want to download virtualbox to run server operating systems.

Re:So I Have To Have A Dual Socket Server?

[sirsnork]

And there will be an option under system settings to change it, just like there has been with all the NT based systems, including the desktop ones

Re:So I Have To Have A Dual Socket Server?

[ultranova]

The quantum for the threading is set for server loads at the expense of faster performance with fewer threads.

Does that actually matter anymore? If there's lots of cores and few threads, then chances are that there's an idle core ready to start executing a task that becomes runnable right away, and each task will effectively have a dedicated core.

Re:So I Have To Have A Dual Socket Server?

[Anonymous Coward]

"That is not recommended. The quantum for the threading is set for server loads at the expense of faster performance with fewer threads. Server is tuned to running many many loads over faster smaller loads."

You are an idiot. The only difference between the server and the workstation preset parameters is that the workstation is set to give priority boost to clicky-pokey applications, and the server is not. This is usually the first thing that needs fixing (disabling so it is like the server) on Microsoft workstation OSes. It is s crutch because Microsoft does not know how to multitask properly.

There is no other difference and other than that, the scheduler is unchanged.

You comment is especially ridiculous since the general rule with Microsoft OSes is to run one and only one application per instance of the OS. Entertainment systems excepted. This is because it is such an unreliable piece of crap that crashes all the time and is so fought with bugs and other garbage that it still requires a reboot every day.

Re:So I Have To Have A Dual Socket Server?

[thejynxed]

Games like FO4 & The Witcher III are much better at being able to utilize multiple thread processing, if the cores to do so are available. It might end up being better to run them on Enterprise/Server than it is on Home/Pro.

That being said, this is a niche use and if you aren't going to also use the particular benefits of this OS version for the other things it is ostensibly used for, it will end up being a waste of money and compute cycles in the end.

Lol

[Anonymous Coward]

My company moved from Windows to Linux. How many cores is that, Redmond?

Re:Lol

[__aaclcg7560]

I'm sure the Microsoft tax department will give you a number.

Re:Lol

[Anonymous Coward]

Our company replaced the WIn-XP-Home "server" with a Windows-7 (standard) "server". It runs some licensing tools and MS-SQL-express. Everything actually important runs on Linux servers.

Any real tangible merits to using Windows Server?

[bogaboga]

Can someone tell me what exactly I am missing by [stubbornly] refusing to use Windows Server? I know there surely exist some advantages but what are they really?

I have been using Debian Linux on our servers for almost 13 years now and we have no regrets! We have Samba installed as well.

I sincerely do not know what I am missing as our systems have not given us any trouble for a long time.

I must say we have some company contracted for support just in case. Who will bite?

You may wonder what then keeps me busy: Well, We experiment a lot and contribute to quashing Debian specific bugs from time to time.

Long ago, before the cloud

[smittyoneeach]

Long ago, before the cloud, people used to fret all that "irony" stuff.

aaaaaanndd.....

[Anonymous Coward]

..fsck it lets just install linux and be done with it.

Windows on a server?

[Anonymous Coward]

"A sucker is born every minute" -- P.T. Barnum.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone tell me what exactly I am missing by [stubbornly] refusing to use Windows Server? I know there surely exist some advantages but what are they really?

I recommend reading the Ars Technica link to the story in the summary, as there are a huge number of sys admins who explain why Win Server is used so much in enterprise Long story short - Microsoft knows what corporations want and makes it dead easy to do things that scale from a small business to a huge multinational. Whether it's through tech such as Group Policy, Active Directory or Exchange, it's stood the test of time in terms of large administration of servers. It integrates so damn nicely as well. I'd go on but again, the Ars link has comments which explain this much better than I could.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Schnapple]

For a long time it was the only option to run .NET applications on (i.e., an ASP.NET site, .NET web services, .NET Windows services, etc.) so vendor lock-in plays a big part. That's potentially different now that .NET is open source and Microsoft is friendlier to FOSS stuff but for the time being most businesses will just suck it up with the devil they know.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[hodet]

Active Directory and Exchange are reasons given by many enterprises. I am sure there are other decent options but that and a place to point your finger if things go wrong. If you are a PHB, perhaps a kickback or two.

Just another way to raise prices...

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the industry is moving to multiple core processor packages - 8/16 at a time...

It allows them to nearly double the price for a system.

Not surprising

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

As someone who is peripherally involved with MS data centers I can tell you that the whole Azure/cloud thing is booming like mad. It's insane.

They literally cannot build data centers fast enough so what they're doing is buying and/or leasing buildings, gutting them, rebuilding them and hardening them to keep up with demand. And they're still not keeping up, there's a huge pent up backlog of demand and capacity that is growing like crazy. They literally can't keep up with the need for secured server space that meets their requirements.

Re:Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

You might want to have a look at server market share. You might find that you're missing what's really going on.

Re:Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you think the Microsoft cloud operates from???

Re:Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you think the Microsoft cloud operates from???

Hell?

Re:Not surprising

[__aaclcg7560]

Uranus.

Re:Not surprising

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

You might want to have a look at server market share. You might find that you're missing what's really going on.

I might be, but that doesn't negate what I'm observing on a daily basis one bit.

The fact is that Microsoft is experiencing a huge, HUGE fucking demand for their Azure stuff and their cloud services. HUGE. I'm not kidding, I sit in meetings where they're talking about how fast they can buy huge tracts of land and lease big-ass buildings to turn into secure server farms in order to meet the current demand. They can't build out the physical spaces fast enough to keep up.

Whatever is going on, they're getting a huge fucking piece of it, okay? I personally don't give two shits for Azure, but someone out there sure does and that's a fact, like it or not. Good or bad, the Azure stuff has become very, very popular (and very, very lucrative).

Re:Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me guess, everybody are running Linux containers on Azure?

Re:Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft FY15Q3 earnings report says:
"Commercial cloud revenue grew 106% (up 111% in constant currency) driven by Office 365, Azure and Dynamics CRM Online, and is now on an annualized revenue run rate of $6.3 billion "

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Anonymous Coward]

I know there surely exist some advantages but what are they really?

Lack of SystemD isn't advantage enough?

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Opportunist]

Well, nobody is going to invite you to a holiday resort and play golf with you if you use Linux servers. Though I'm not sure whether Red Hat has caught on by now.

Vendor lock-in is the only explanation

[Jeremi]

If you're a sane businessperson, you make sure your server software is easily portable to any OS, so that when a particular vendor tries to hike their licensing fees, you can just say "thanks, no thanks" and move your software to some other platform as necessary.

Or, if you're completely blinkered and naive, maybe you've decided to irrevocably tie yourself and your company to a single vendor's platform, so that they can now do whatever they want to you and your only choice is to either pay up or rewrite your software from scratch.

If you find yourself paying lots of money to run your software on an OS named for and designed around its GUI interface --- in order to run your software on a headless server in the cloud -- you might be in the latter category.

Re:Vendor lock-in is the only explanation

[hawk]

Except that for SQL, that divergence his at insanely low levels--like the spelling of TIMESTAMP . . .

And the divergent features offer performance--so avoiding them means more or more powerful servers, just to keep your options open.

There are standards such as Posix that are reasonably tight, allowing at least straightforward adaptation, and there are those like SQL, which don't seem to mean much more than that developers from one will mostly be able to read the code of another . . .

hawk

Re:Vendor lock-in is the only explanation

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're a sane businessperson, you make sure your server software is easily portable to any OS

Ha, ha, no. If you're a sane business person, you do whatever makes sense to keep your business going. If there's a business justification for the additional expense of making your server software easily portable to any OS, which costs time, QA work, etc, *AND* there are no other places where the money could be spent better, then and only then do you do it.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Anonymous Coward]

This reads like marketing copy.

OP asked for technical details. You provided words that belong on glossy pages printed for C-level management.

One thing's for sure, though. Microsoft software "integrates so damn nicely" only with Microsoft software. ;)

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[unixisc]

Is GP migrating to one of the BSDs in that case?

Three original Stones still in the Stones

[tepples]

Of the four present members of The Rolling Stones, three (Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Charlie Watts) were with the band since the beginning. You might be confusing them with Stone Temple Pilots, whose original lead vocalist recently died.

Re:Three original Stones still in the Stones

[smittyoneeach]

All of the above died during the Administration of Bush the Elder, and are kept "alive" through Caribbean rituals.

Re:Three original Stones still in the Stones

[ShaunC]

You might be thinking of Dick Cheney.

Re:Three original Stones still in the Stones

[Bing Tsher E]

No, man. They're members of the undead. Just look at Jagger if you need proof.

And the Stones ended when they murdered Brian Jones anyways.

Re:Three original Stones still in the Stones

[smittyoneeach]

That would be the Aztec Variations.

Re:Three original Stones still in the Stones

[Grishnakh]

Of the four present members of The Rolling Stones, three (Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Charlie Watts) were with the band since the beginning.

Yes, but at least one of them, Keith Richards, is dead. The others might be too, but Keith definitely is. He's still able to tour and perform just fine despite this.

Why Windows Server?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not saying FOSS doesn't do any of this but Windows Server out of the box does an impressive number of things if you spend an evening, or two, or three going over all of the modules that can be enabled - especially with multiple servers, it can be rather impressive. If you've stayed away from Windows server for a while, at least take a peek at what it does for nothing less than to at least satisfy your curiosity. I've had a bias against apple products for a long time, lately I've just been open minded to everything that's out there - it's all the same and different. I'm starting to view Apple only guys, Windows only guys and Linux only guys as ancient history - time to take it all in. I swear the major bias against Windows is when we were younger we didn't want to pay for anything, everyone had it and we wanted to be 'elite' so we went with 'nix. Also everything crashed all the time which sucked (I usually, not always, blame crappy apps for this). Regardless, take a peak of a Windows 2012 install - very curious what 2016 will be like. I use Windows Server a lot myself, I would like to use Linux more here and there, but I don't feel 'smart' or 'patient' enough. I'm just used to Windows I guess (but I'm trying new things all the time)

Re:Why Windows Server?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck off Microsoft shill!!!!

Urgh, you dickheads are disgusting. At the very very least, try to be better at your job.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[unixisc]

The only thing that strikes me is application servers, where you'd run a compute heavy application remotely on a Windows server if your local PC was anemic. However, that's not been the case for several years now, so that's a good question. I read about Exchange and Active Directory. How many people run their own Exchange servers now a days as opposed to just renting GMail's services for their work? And if one is looking for a place to point fingers, Linux has Red Hat and I believe even Debian would have arrangements if someone wanted them to help service their software. And for FreeBSD, there is iXsystems

and as you realize web apps need security

[raymorris]

Another change there is how companies are viewing web servers and applications. Previously a company already had Windows admins and Windows programmers supporting their Windows desktops. When they needed a web application they had their Windows admins connect a box to the internet, and their Windows desktop programmers put together an application. Microsoft made it fairly easy for people accustomed to writing desktop guis to put their code on the web. That all made perfect sense.

What some are starting to realize is that your web applications will be attacked about a dozen times per hour. The Windows desktop devs are a accustomed to writing software that doesn't often crash -on accident- ; their mindset just doesn't consider that people would be attacking their applications -on purpose-.

With the realization that you really shouldn't have your desktop support team configuring and running public servers, and that the guy who knows how to write an Excel macro has no business coding a publicly accessible web application, the idea of "we already have Windows people" goes out the window. You realise you need a team people who are qualified to design and maintain internet based applications and systems. As long as you have a separate team on a separate network, you may as well use a network OS well-suited to the task. Have your desktop support team know desktops, with a desktop OS, and your network team know a network OS.

Re:and as you realize web apps need security

[Required Snark]

Do you actually think that any organization gives a shit about security? Once a week there is a data breach that shows that upper management cares more about having nice business cards then any security. Security is a cost. It never contributes to the bottom line. Since it isn't profitable this quarter it is never a useful expenditure.

Even after getting burned the corporate attitude doesn't change. Is Sony a three time looser, or a four time looser or a five time looser? I forget. After the PlayStation network got hacked, they still were completely clueless for the Sony Pictures hack. I bet that there are still other divisions at Sony that will get hacked. Or have been hacked and it hasn't come to light yet.

Or the Office of Personal Management hack. That was far worse then the Snowden data dump. There are now intelligence cadres in the People's Republic of China who know more about US intelligence operations then almost any one in the US. In the US, all this was completely compartmentalized, because it was too sensitive. Now the cat is out of the bag.

They know the real names, backgrounds, and organizational positions of everyone who ever got a clearance in the US. That is a complete roadmap of the organizational structure and personal of the entire US industrial-government complex, along with a lot of info about the military, since so many military go directly into classified civilian positions.

That is far more valuable then the meta data and recordings of every phone call made on the entire planet. The NSA compulsion to spy on every human on earth is a horrific mistake. There is too much data to be useful, and all the effort spent on this takes away from the effort to actually find out what the opposition is actually doing. Knowing when and how long you spent talking to you're cousin in Kansas City has absolutely nothing to do with ISIS, or what the heck the Russians or Iran is doing. It's just cruft in the data base.

So telling people that security counts is like saying that Santa is real, except it actively makes things worse. If security counted then things would be really different then they are right now. Suck it up and face the truth. Security is so close to non-existence that it's almost extinct.

licensed by physical cores, not virtual cores.

[Joe_Dragon]

Windows Server and System Center 2016 are licensed by physical cores, not virtual cores.

So in a VM I can tell the os that I have 2 sockets with 8 cores each that have say 16-32 HT cores as well.

Now what about vm's where say I have 2-4 windows VM's on the same system and the VM host os is not windows?

Re:licensed by physical cores, not virtual cores.

[FaxeTheCat]

The virtualization layer is not really relevant for the VM licensing, whether it is Hyper-V or VMware (or anyhing else).

Just another reason not to use MS Server

[Anonymous Coward]

As if you need another reason.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Luthair]

Thats funny, I thought the only reason you used a .NET application was because you were using a Windows server. Maybe its circular :)

AMD "modules"

[tepples]

Cores: the number of compute cores available. I think this is pretty clear.

Not on AMD it isn't. The cores of its processors since Bulldozer are sort of a hybrid between actual cores and SMT thread states.

Re:AMD "modules"

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's called CMT. They fused two cores together into a single module and forced them to share resources. Unlike Intel's SMT implementation that effectively runs a second thread using empty/available pipeline stages, CMT actually duplicates certain hardware according to the design spec of the microarchitecture. In the case of BD/PD/SR/XV, AMD chose to load up on integer resources moreso than floating point resources. It is the shortage of 256-bit FMACs that makes AMD CMT-based CPUs appear to have a deficiency.

Re:AMD "modules"

[AmiMoJo]

I was thinking the same thing. This scheme appears to favour Intel CPUs where you get say 8 real, fully independent cores that might also have hyperthreading on top, over AMD CPUs where you get 8 "almost" cores but pairs of them share many resources, and no hyperthreading on top.

Re:Why...????

[Dan Ost]

Exchange and the surrounding ecosystem.

In other words, Oracle licensing.

[sethstorm]

Not good there, not good here.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Anonymous Coward]

IIS and MS-SQL are a couple of others, if you are into making .NET websites with MS-SQL backends. They've stepped up the ability to make nice to maintain, debug, and write apps with the newer versions of MVC. I think I can outperform any coder using open tools doing the same thing, but thats the end of the advantage. It will cost SIGNIFICANTLY more to license and .NET isn't known for high performance, so in addition to each of your license costing more, you will need more servers with those licenses to get the same performance.

So if your biggest cost by far is paying developers, it might be a good idea. If it were my business, I wouldn't use it.

Now look at Sun/Oracle CMT processors...

[Anonymous Coward]

T5 CPU - 16 Cores, 8 Threads per core, which translates to 128 vcpus per chip.
On a T5-2 Server, you end up with 256 vcpus and up to a terabyte of ram.

That includes 32 Math coprocessors (1 per core), 32 encryption accelerators (1 per core) and the ability to run each core in single-threaded mode, a feature which IBM recently copied and called it their "turbo-core".

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[F.Ultra]

"System Services" in Windows is even worse than SysVInit, having access to something like systemd on a Windows server is a wet wet dream.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Anonymous Coward]

It has SCM, which is what systemd wants to be when it grows up.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[ranton]

Thats funny, I thought the only reason you used a .NET application was because you were using a Windows server. Maybe its circular :)

Perhaps not circular, as the cycle begins with the developers machines running Windows. The combination of Microsoft Office and their desire to use arguably the best IDE in the industry (Visual Studio) keeps most developers in the enterprise using Windows. Since they are already using Windows, and their favorite development tools are geared towards the .NET ecosystem, using .NET just makes sense. Add to that C# being a really great language along with .NET being a pretty good platform and there are a lot of reasons so much software is written for the Microsoft stack.

I am in the process of weaning myself off of the Microsoft stack because I don't see them winning in the move to the cloud. I would pay thousands of dollars per year for a development environment as good as Visual Studio that runs on Linux. I have tried VIM, Sublime, Eclipse, Netbeans (only briefly) MonoDevelop (also briefly), and IntelliJ. IntelliJ comes reasonably close and VIM isn't that bad when you get good with it. But Visual Studio is still a joy to work with comparatively.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Zero__Kelvin]

"Microsoft knows what corporations want and makes it dead easy to do things that scale from a small business to a huge multinational."

That is a ridiculous claim. I have extensive experience with Linux and Microsoft, and claiming that Microsoft makes things easier is just plain ridiculous. It is the kind of claim that could only be made by a person who has Microsoft experience, but none with Linux (or at least significantly less).

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Anonymous Coward]

I can name a few reasons.

First, no enterprise can exist without AD. Yes, LDAP is nice, but it just doesn't scale. AD can scale outwards with inter-forest trusts, and forests, or upwards with trees and domains.

Second, realistically, Exchange is the only game in town when it comes to E-mail. IBM and Google are exceptions, but they eat their own dog food.

After that, Windows Server 2016 has hyperconvergence features. Picture VMWare vSAN, except not sucking. Need more disk space? Add more nodes, and the OS will add the drives into the backing store.

Of course, shielded VMs come to mind. This protects against physical tampering. VMWare ESXi has zero encryption, which is a major weakness. People have to either have the SAN software do the encryption on the LUN level, or enable encryption in the VMs themselves.

Windows 2016 will get adopted... it may be more expensive, but sure as heck a lot cheaper than a new VNX.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[__aaclcg7560]

According to my coworkers, the last time they were invited to a Microsoft conference was in Hawaii ten years ago. Prior to that they attended three or four conferences per year. Looks like Microsoft caught on to Red Hat by not offering that perk.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Anonymous Coward]

"First, no enterprise can exist without AD. Yes, LDAP is nice, but it just doesn't scale."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Athena

Throw away your old servers

[Anonymous Coward]

Minimum of 16 cores per system? My workplace only has that many cores or more on the compute nodes, and they run Linux. The Windows servers have four cores on average (either dual-dual-core or single-quad-core). No upgrade for you!

Re:Throw away your old servers

[One With Whisp]

No, what they're saying is if your system has less than 16 cores you still need to pay for 16, and if you have less than 8*n cores in an n-socket systme you still need to pay as if you did.

Basically they're hiking the price on systems with many cores.

Vote with your shotgun, people.

Tthat's starting to change. $100B spent on securit

[raymorris]

> There are now intelligence cadres in the People's Republic of China who know more about US intelligence operations then almost any one in the US.

You're not wrong there.

The attitude you describe in US companies and general organizations is changing, though not fast enough. Information security is one of the fastest growing fields in the world.
Research firm Gartner projects that the world will spend $101 billion on information security in 2018.

A report by Visiongain, a business intelligence firm in London, indicates that the global cyber security market was worth $75.4 billion in 2015.

I pay attention to this stuff because I've been doing information security for a living for 15 years. Some of the money companies and businesses are starting to invest in improving their security posture is my pay check, so it matters very much to me.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Anonymous Coward]

OP asked for technical details. You provided words that belong on glossy pages printed for C-level management.

That is exactly the point. Technical details are irrelevant if the product is good enough (technically) and for the rest, fits neatly into the business requirements.

Linux doesn't, out of the box, even at a base level. Additionally, non-MS OSes do not support the big buzzwordy MS platforms that businesses love - SSRS, SharePoint, Dynamics, Exchange... the parts which actually matter.

No-one cares what their applications run on, they just want to use their applications.

Disguised major price increase

[Tony Isaac]

In some scenarios, the licensing for SQL Server has gone up from about 20K to about 90K, due to the per-core licensing scheme. It was enough to persuade my company to move to PostgreSQL.

Re:Disguised major price increase

[Cederic]

That would be rather awkward for the MS account manager, if they try and pull that one where I work.

We already have extensive skillsets in other DBs, switching would be a massive pain - but $70k/year pays for a lot of pain.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes it isn't up to us, who install and maintain servers, to decide which system to use. In some places the developers want SQL Server, so there's a Windows Server for that. The suits decide on Exchange to have integrated mail and calendaring. Most workstations at the big institution run WIndows, so the obvious solution to printing services and file sharing are CIFS and DFS (you run into lots of problems with Samba in a real, big environment). There are also the domain controllers for Active Directory. So that's quite a few WIndows Servers.

Maintaining a Windows environment with thousands of workstations with Linux and Samba is a pain in the ass. Also, what do you suggest to management as an alternative when they are considering Active Directory and Exchange? There is no *nix-like alternative that even compares when it comes to calendaring and sharing of email accounts with granular permissions.

Sometimes the company decides to license a software that only runs on Windows Server. It doesn't make sense not to license it, if it's good and meets the requirements, just because of the platform it runs on.

The place you work at have a certain set of requirements and needs, other places have other sets of requirements and needs. Perhaps if you ever work at a different, maybe bigger, place you'll understand why some of us use Windows (in my case, there's both Windows Server, and lots of Ubuntu, CentOS and *BSDs).

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Jjeff1]

Not just AD, but group policy, which is a decent GUI that lets you install software and push settings down to computers, users and groups. When you need to modify security settings on 5000 PCs it's pretty painless to do so. Er, most of the time

So we pay for the pleasure of

[dmomo]

Having to buy more cpus, which we only have to do because of their bloated system. Sounds legit.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[mlts]

I think "making things easier" is being mixed up with "easier to find MS experience than Linux experience."

The problem I encounter, having sat in both worlds, is that each side thinks their stuff is the right hammer, and everything is a nail. The MS guys want to use their wrench as a screwdriver, while the Linux guys want to carve notches in bolts so they can use their screwdriver in place of a wrench.

A couple use cases: Spawning Hadoop instances on OpenStack [1] or AWS is a lot easier with Linux than Windows. It can be done with Windows, but it is a lot easier to find howto guides and such under Linux. Another case is popping up nginx web servers on compute nodes for static content behind a load balancer. That is pretty easy with ansible [2], lsync, and varnish. In Windows, it can be done, but it would require some fancy footwork with SCCM/SCOM/WIM.

On the opposite side, for a massive directory service (something spanning multiple geographical regions, with many employees and company division/org charts that look like spaghetti), AD has a lot more support than the various LDAP platforms [3], and has proven to be good enough, security-wise.

Best thing to do is use both. Windows winds up at the core, Linux/BSD/etc. are at the edge.

[1]: Windows and OpenStack are like oil and water. I've not heard of any OpenStack deployments based on Hyper-V, especially on Kilo and Liberty. I wouldn't be surprised to see it (as Microsoft has embraced Docker in a useful fashion), but not at this stage.

[2]: Ansible is easy to include in the VM image, so it either can have an image pushed to it, or it can hit a Git server, grab its playbooks, then run those.

[3]: I've used other directory services. I would say that AD is a lot less painful than AFS or DFS/DCE. Things can change on a dime, and an AD competitor that can scale and replicate can come out of nowhere, similar to how Ansible/Puppet/Chef/Salt wasn't on anyone's radar a few years ago, but now is a staple of IT/DevOps as of now.

Microsoft moving to per-core licensing ..

[nickweller]

"Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Moving To Per-Core Licensing"

Because Microsoft has decided that people who update their own hardware must pay Microsoft for the privilege.

"Windows Server 2012 has two main editions, Standard and Datacenter" and the only diffence between them is a registry hack.

Re:Microsoft moving to per-core licensing ..

[ThosLives]

Rent seeking always sucks when you're the renter.

Re:Microsoft moving to per-core licensing ..

[Anonymous Coward]

Data center also has a LIABILITY clause that they WILL PAY for damage by the Data Center OS. Standard edition has no such clause.

That is worth it's weight in GOLD.

Re:Microsoft moving to per-core licensing ..

[LVSlushdat]

Golly gee.. Kinda sounds like the difference between Windows 2000 Workstation and Windows 2000 server... Some whiz-kids found those registry changes and it was fun (for a time) to make the changes and see your (cheaper) Windows 2000 Workstation boot up as a (more expensive) Windows 2000 server... Did it myself many moon ago....

Re:Microsoft moving to per-core licensing ..

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 2012 and 2012 R2 has a NASTY bug. It hit us at work. It took down a production server and we had Microsoft on the phone all day and they couldn't get the server back up either. The bug also meant NONE of our backups were any good either. We tired a full weeks worth of backups and NONE of them would boot.. And NO ONE knows what causes the bug to show it's ugly head - not even Microsoft. The bug is that suddenly your server will not boot - period. It's dead as a door nail. We ended up having to have our production reporting server down for almost a week while we rebuilt it from the ground up.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Anonymous Coward]

You're asking slashdot what you're missing??? Wrong place Mr. Stubborn!

Re: Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serv

[Anonymous Coward]

You must have been dropped as a child. Try doing high security compliance on Windows server and then on Linux. Linux does it just fine, even better, but it's waaaay more work to implement and prove. Config management is great but group policies are reeeealy nice. And I say that as someone who would never run Windows at home.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the only post that I can see where real experience is factored in. Fine job, sir. The right tool for the right job is the only answer. Anything else is just zealotry.

Well, what sort of money are we talking about?

[Anonymous Coward]

Approximately how much money does Microsoft charge for, say, a 6 core Xeon (12 Hyperthreaded cores) ?

I know "it depends" but what ballpark -- early hundreds, late hundreds, early thousands...?

Re:Well, what sort of money are we talking about?

[FaxeTheCat]

The priing is in the link provided.

In short, it starts around $800 before discounts.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Anonymous Coward]

"No-one cares what their applications run on, they just want to use their applications."

This.

I'm adminning a Win environment at the moment, but I'm a Linux guy through and through. However, there is no WAY i'm adminning 100+ users and PCs without AD. There just is no substitute in the Linux world. There is no CRM comparable to Dynamics in the Linux world. There is no RMM comparable to Labtech in the FOSS world.

In short, while Linux developers write and rewrite compositors, CPU governors, init systems, and memory managers, the commercial world is getting on with the business of doing business.

When I cal give my sales guys an alternative to Dynamics, my admin guys an alternative to MS Office, my marketing team an alternative to Adobe Creative Cloud, and my board of directors and alternative to mspaint.exe then I'll be able to move our org over to FOSS.

Until then, not happening.

Windows: the choice of the incompetent.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not secure, not securable, not performant, needlessly complex. Microsoft is what you use when just don't know any better.

Re:Windows: the choice of the incompetent.

[LVSlushdat]

HERE HERE!! I'd mod you up if I could...

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Dog-Cow]

You must fit right in.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Dog-Cow]

What is the non-MS answer to Active Directory?

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Cyberax]

Right now? Not much.

About 15 years ago, Windows was the only way to run a decent file and printserver. It was also much better documented and had better performance tools than contemporary Linux servers.

Right now all these advantages faded - printing is easily done by standalone networked printers, fileservers are not nearly as ubiquitous as before and Linux is way faster. However, Windows is still useful in a number of cases: as an ActiveDirectory host, as a platform to run SQL Server and for Exchange installations. But that's a narrow niche, really.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Anonymous Coward]

That is a ridiculous claim. I have extensive experience with Linux and Microsoft, and claiming that Microsoft makes things easier is just plain ridiculous. It is the kind of claim that could only be made by a person who has Microsoft experience, but none with Linux (or at least significantly less).

Oh, the irony. You're a known troll and Linux zealot. Your own claims are highly suspect.

Just like Oracle and

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just like Oracle (except that they were at $40,000 per processor core per year about 10 years ago). Solaris used to do this too. Linux isn't looking so bad now though.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't have systemd installed, so theres that.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the non-MS answer to Active Directory?

eDirectory on SLES or OpenLDAP

Sadly, all physical cores must be licenced

[kronix2]

Oracle have long insisted that a system's physical cores be licenced.

"Using IBM processors in TurboCore mode is not permitted as a means to reduce the number of software licenses required; all cores must be licensed." - http://www.oracle.com/us/corpo...

It's been possible for at least a decade to disable cores at BIOS level in an x86 system - typically "disable half the cores" or "disable all but Core0".

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Z00L00K]

Everything else is worse than SysV init. Even Systemd, which is really bad.

Re:Now that systemd is killing linux

[Z00L00K]

I second that.

The systemd is full steam into the Microsoft trap of system configurations hard to grasp and log files hard to get at.

Amazes me: People accept Microsoft's ABUSE.

[Anonymous Coward]

Will Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella go to prison? Other spyware makers have been convicted.

Will there be an anti-trust case against Microsoft's virtual monopoly?

Articles about Microsoft abusing customers:

Microsoft's Software is Malware. Malware means software designed to function in ways that mistreat or harm the user.

How Can Any Company Ever Trust Microsoft Again?

NSA Backdoor Exploit in Windows 8 Uncovered

Microsoft Gave the NSA Direct Backdoor Access to Outlook, Skype

Microsoft has no plans to tell us what's in Windows patches. Each update is a black box, and it's going to stay that way.

Leaks show that Microsoft writes release notes, so why can't it publish them? The lack of documentation of Windows' updates is a baffling move on Microsoft's part.

Microsoft [lack of] Privacy Statement

Here's how to Block Windows 10 "Spying"

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[nnull]

Nothing. Continue on as if nothing is going on. Most companies that run Windows Server run some hybrid mess of linux with windows anyways that makes no sense.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Anonymous Coward]

LDAP

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Cederic]

When your company has 2200 server applications from 200 different vendors, inevitably some of those are going to be "Windows only".

Add in AD, Exchange and the relatively cheap licenses for SQL Server (compared to DB2 or Oracle, or fuck it, even the third party support overheads for the open source stuff) and the relative ease of acquiring Windows admins, it's a pretty straightforward decision to make Windows Server one of your core supported platforms.

Along with and (sadly at the last four companies I've worked for) a bloody expensive computer from IBM.

Intel/AMD Response

[SJ]

I thought about Intel/AMDs response to this as the concept is a direct attack on the profit percentage of a computer. MS is unsurprisingly trying to take more.

Consider this.

Random company has X dollars to spend on a new server. Y is allocated to the hardware and Z is allocated to licensing. Whereas previously they could get an 8 core dual socket machine. This would give Intel/AMD a sale of 2 of their better margin CPU's. Now, the company has to re-allocate funds to MS licensing and therefore needs to buy a smaller, lower margin CPU to keep within budget.

This directly affects Intel/AMD's profitability.

The solution I propose is that Intel/AMD license their CPU's to Azure on an 'instructions per second over time' model. Basically if the CPU maxes out for anything more than a burst, extra fee's a due. Fr the regular user who's CPU isn't pegged at 100% day in and day out, then it wouldn't make a difference. But if you run a large web services company...

Something tells me MS wouldn't like that very much.

Re:Intel/AMD Response

[Anonymous Coward]

Random company has X dollars to spend on a new server. Y is allocated to the hardware and Z is allocated to licensing. Whereas previously they could get an 8 core dual socket machine. This would give Intel/AMD a sale of 2 of their better margin CPU's. Now, the company has to re-allocate funds to MS licensing and therefore needs to buy a smaller, lower margin CPU to keep within budget.

Under this licensing system they buy 8x Server 2016 2-core licenses for their 8 core dual socket machine. Under Server 2012, they would have had to buy 1x Server 2012 2-socket license, as there was never a 1-socket license for Server. The 2016 license is 1/8 the price of the 2012 license.
What this means is they'd pay exactly the same price for an 8 core dual socket machine regardless of the license sought. They can also use a 2 socket 16 core machine with either license at exactly the same price, so going 4 core per socket or 8 core per socket is purely a choice based on the cost/benefit of that hardware.
Microsoft is requiring more money on hardware that has more than 16 cores regardless of the number of sockets. Otherwise, there's literally nothing to see here.

Increasing cores, declining VM host counts?

[swb]

VMware did some kind of pricing change a few years ago (which I think they may have later modified) when they figured out that people were beating the system by loading up multicore machines with maxed out memory and cutting their licensing costs.

My guess this is a similar gambit by Microsoft. Use whatever statistics they can get on server sales, plus their own sales information and work out an equation that allows them to maximize revenue.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Anonymous Coward]

> However, there is no WAY i'm adminning 100+ users and PCs without AD. There just is no substitute in the Linux world.

Whatever Red Hat was shipping in the early 2000's let *one* man spend about an hour a week administrating 500+ PCs and a couple-thousand users at this one place I used to work. This _one_ guy got far more work done than ten _full-time_ Windows admins. So, your claim that "nothing replaces AD" is bunk.

Few people will make the claim that AD is bad software. It's not. It is -however- very, very far from unique in the space.

Just go see what Red Hat provides for user and PC management. It's obviously quite good.

Re: Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serv

[Anonymous Coward]

> Try doing high security compliance on Windows server and then on Linux. Linux does it just fine, even better, but it's waaaay more work to implement and prove.

That would be because the lazy-ass compliance auditing orgs haven't bothered to either prepare or (if they've bothered to prepare a sheet) keep their checkbox compliance sheets up to date for a given Linux distro. They refuse to take the time to recognize that even if the distro changes, the software doing the security is almost always the same. They shift the burden of demonstration of proof on to the sysadmin.

Source: I worked in a high-security software development shop, and *saw* the compliance sheets for Windows *and* a couple of dreadfully-out-of-date Linux distros (with known *remote* vulns that *fixed* in *later* *minor* versions of that distro, but one couldn't use the later versions of the disto because there wasn't a sheet for it. They would still certify the known-vulnerable distro because they weren't "officially" aware of the vulns, lel.). Compliance/assurance companies are 80% about CYA and 20% about actual security. This means that a *huge* number of insecure configurations get approved just because all the checkboxes on their compliance sheets were checked.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody wants Active Directory. You have an actual business problem? You want to solve that. Active directory just happens to be the unbelievable complex, insecure, slow, poorly scaling hammer that MS makes you use for every authentication task.

Good luck with that!

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Anonymous Coward]

AD is still recommended (by MS themselves) to be deployed only on an intranet, not exposed to the internet due to security risks, so I beg to differ that it's appropriate at all for a massive directory search. Also, you make it sound like this is a hard problem - but as the vast number of websites having more users than even the biggest AD forest on earth demonstrate, it's really not. AD scales very poorly; particularly when it comes to nesting (necessary at scale), and joining/removing machines from it (needs to be cheap for throw-away virtualization).

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Anonymous Coward]

"...for the rest, fits neatly into the business requirements. Linux doesn't, out of the box, even at a base level [fit neatly into these completely unspecified business requirements]."

Have fun with that strawman, kid.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, there are a load of things you're missing. One big part of using Microsoft Software is the complex licences. You'll have missed out on many board meetings with the Finance Director, where you try to explain why everything suddenly needs to cost more. You'll have missed out on explaining to developers that they can't use certain features because they are too expensive. You'll have missed out on many other meetings where people try to cherry pick which bits they can and can't use, how "no-one will mind" if you start to ignore the software licences, and numerous arguments over limiting hardware and installs in order to keep under budget.

Aside from hours of arguments, meetings and compromises you will also have missed out on terrible user interfaces with teeny-tiny unusable fixed-size windows and "wiggle" areas on the screen. Systems Administrators who insist on only using GUIs because that is all they can use. A lack of documentation easily and readily available for each release would also be missing.

To sum it all up, you're basically missing a load of hassle and headaches. So... what are you waiting for? Come join the fun!

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck off Microsoft shill!!!

What about licensing 1/4 of 1 core?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that version free? :)

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[tapushaikh]

"Microsoft knows what corporations want and makes it dead easy to do things that scale from a small business to a huge multinational."

That is a ridiculous claim. I have extensive experience with Linux and Microsoft, and claiming that Microsoft makes things easier is just plain ridiculous. It is the kind of claim that could only be made by a person who has Microsoft experience, but none with Linux (or at least significantly less).

Not necessarily. It is the type of claim that could also be made by someone who has a financial interest.

Re: Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serv

[LDAPMAN]

15 years ago if all you wanted was file and print then the best choice was Netware.

Technical solutions to price fixing?

[unixisc]

More oomph per core also violates a major requirement of all post 2000 CPUs - that they conserve power. In the days before multicores, you had CPUs trying out various combinations of superscaling and superpipelining in order to maximize performance. A major reason being that OSs at the time had limited multi-processing capabilities, and even when they did, their software didn't.

Things changed once NT came around, and since NT could do SMP, Intel could boost performances by tossing a number of their top core CPUs into the mix, and NT, being SMP like Unix, could handle that. So now Intel had a new more scalable way to boost performance, as well as segment the market instead of sinking w/ the Itanic. They could offer dual or quad core for PCs, while offering their 8-32 cores for servers.

The GP's description was good, but the problem w/ that approach is that it's a technical solution to an artificial problem - that of hiking prices by changing the pricing model. Unlike technical solutions to issues such as power consumption or limited performance, this is not something that the technologists should be solving. The proper solution to Oracle, Sybase and the other enterprise software companies jacking up prices is to explore more FOSS solutions, such as ProgreSQL or NoSQL. And when Microsoft does this, explore the BSDs or Linux.

Re:Technical solutions to price fixing?

[dl_sledding]

...The proper solution to Oracle, Sybase and the other enterprise software companies jacking up prices is to explore more FOSS solutions, such as ProgreSQL or NoSQL. And when Microsoft does this, explore the BSDs or Linux.

I agree wholeheartedly; however, the software industry needs to follow suit as well. There are many, many professional software packages that *require* M$ Windows as the host operating system. I harp on the ones that I need to deal with every chance I get, but there never, ever seems to be any acceptance there, even though some of them actually develop on *nix OSes and then port to M$ for the public version. Until the software industry offers versions for both M$ and *nix, your suggestion is, at best, a dream.

How does this help customers?

[fey000]

"In order to better serve our customers, we have decided to charge more for the same features."

Which goddamn customers asked for higher licensing fees?

Weren't they already doing this?

[Anonymous Coward]

I seem to recall Windows NT licensing per core, including cores in other sockets.

The nice part about this scheme is the number of customers that they will drive away toward Linux.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Anonymous Coward]

VDI. IPA. Siebel CRM.

No real competitor to Exchange, so that still runs on some Windows servers. Creative Cloud I have no idea about, never used it. mspaint? really? Wine-wrap that piece of shit if people really want it.

Right, HP UX too

[Anonymous Coward]

HP UX has had "Two User Downgrade - package" about 20 years exactly for this very reason. Because greedy third party softare cost.

Re:Right, HP UX too

[Anonymous Coward]

AIX 4.x also used to have that. Early on, it only allowed two users total to log on the box. It got better in the 5.x days after SVR4.2 code's licensing changed where the upstream licenses were not about the users on the machine.

MS is eating its seed corn. It would be nice for them to go with a saner licensing model, and something simple. At least with Oracle, I don't have to worry about having the right license keys for every feature, making sure the KMS server is reachable from everywhere in the network, etc.

As stated in a previous post, Exchange and AD are top dog right now... but that can change easily. One reason OpenStack is growing is because businesses rather throw developer man-hours at something becoming "good enough" and worry less about licensing fees.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Anonymous Coward]

You do know that AD is just a nicely packaged collection of LDAP, Kerberos, DNS, and DHCP servers, right? To say that "LDAP doesn't scale" would imply that AD doesn't scale either.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[LVSlushdat]

...and eDirectory is Novell's NDS, which has been around since 1993, I'm an old Novell admin and was happy when we switched from the Netware 3.11's bindery over to Novell 4.11 and its NDS in 1995. Unfortuantly the company I was at, decided to move to Windows and its new (at the time) AD soon after, so those of us who really liked NDS were out of luck, and had to learn AD. All I could do was shake my head.. At the time AD was a buggy piece of crap whereas NDS was a pretty stable (and powerful) directory service. Glad to see Novell having ported it to OES, it likely today is one directory service that could challenge AD and win, IF the castrated Novell that exists today would get off its ass...

is it just me,

[unami]

or doesn't the summary make any sense? why sell a 2-core pack, when the minimum required cores per system is 8?

Re:is it just me,

[grahamwest]

Because there are 10-core processors.

8 core minimum?!

[Anonymous Coward]

8 core minimum is ridiculous. I know my customers have an abundance of machines running on 2 or 4 cores. An Active Directory server does not need that kind of horsepower for most orgs, much less 2 or 3 for availability. HEck I have one customer that runs AD just fine on 1 core and 2GB. Most development IIS web servers also do not need 8 cores. This also means that SQL Server would need to be licensed for 8 cores, up from the minimum 4 that the SQL Server license requires. This makes SQL Server even more ungodly expensive... I think the last I checked each 2 core 'pack' of SQL Standard was about $4K.

Bottom line... this will not help MS sell to their customers. It will dramatically increase licensing costs. I think this will result in further erosion of their on prem market and push more customers to the cloud. But once they lose the on prem requirements, those customers won't be running MS on the cloud, they will build to more cost effective platforms.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[jabuzz]

The facetious answer is Samba

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Anonymous Coward]

You asked for technical details and he told you where to find them. Stop complaining like a man-child and go where he directed you to find your answers.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Jack Griffin]

Can someone tell me what exactly I am missing by [stubbornly] refusing to use Windows Server? I know there surely exist some advantages but what are they really?

I can't tell you what *you* are missing, but for most people (not nerds), "IT" means Back Office. And if you want a simple, cheap and easy to support Back Office, it's hard to go past the MS solution. Server, Desktop and mobile OS all integrate seamlessly, you get and LDAP out of the box that just works, and centralised client management via Group Policy. You also get the SQL, Exchange, Office combo that pretty much does everything that most Joe Office users need. And more importantly you can find admins anywhere.
MS admins also tend to be able to relate better with normal people too, since everytime you meet an Linux fan boy they always seem angry and bitter about something.
So in your case, you may not need any of that, but for most businesses there is no other solution that comes close (feel free to offer one, but cobbling together a bunch of clunky, disparate FOSS shit that needs to be band-aided together and constantly tweaked is not what people want).

2016: Year of Linux on the Server!

[CanEHdian]

This time it's really going to happen: 2016 is going to be the Year of Linux on the Server! Oh, wait...

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Anonymous Coward]

A ton of business line applications for major industries require it, unfortunately. The Sage Group (Timberline - Sage 300, Master Builder - Sage 100, both come to mind), as do basically every medical records and billing software I've encountered, very often only deploy out to Windows. Other times you'll have something that requires SQL Server (not just any SQL solution), which also becomes problematic.

I know it's easy to just say "well go use something else" but good luck getting that attitude to work with a growing company that's been using the software for 5 years and doesn't want to migrate over some probably-crappy open source solution with spotty support options. Certain things like web servers, email, and file storage can work fine with a Linux setup, but mission-critical software that's deployed in random businesses is usually tied to Windows in some way.

Re: Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serv

[Cyberax]

Not really. That was 2000-2001 when Netware was a creaking old mess (remember BTrieve?) and could barely do anything _but_ being a fileserver.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with everything you stated, and use the correct tool for the job.
Though I wouldn't necessarily equate AFS/DFS/DCE to Active Directory, it would be more like DFSR. Though I'm curious, and haven't looked in a few years. What technology would be equivalent to Active Directory in Linux? Say, if I wanted to ditch a domain controller and move it to Linux as an experiment.

He doesn't

[Anonymous Coward]

"Why are you acting so entitled to someone else's software?" He doesn't. He's acting like he's entitled to the use of the software that he purchased. It isn't any more purchased because it's running on a powerful machine than when it's run on a dinky little portable.

Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve

[Anonymous Coward]

The closest technology to AD in Linux would be OpenLDAP. However, what keeps AD ahead is its replication, configuration, extensibility with schema additions, and what it stores. For example, I can use AD to store what users get what sudo rights, and this is easily maintained by adding/removing users from a group. If I have a group of users that require stricter password policies than the usual (perhaps they are in finance), I throw them in an OU and apply a GPO.

Delegation? No problem. I can hand over admin rights to a remote admin without issue.

Plus, AD is incredibly easy to stand up, add redundant DCs, and configure.

I would love to see a similar OSS tool available, but right now, there isn't anything that even comes close.

R2?

[Anonymous Coward]

So when is Server 2016 R2 coming out? After the last 8 years, I'm not touching a Microsoft Server OS without R2 in the name with a 10 foot pole. We sold some of our customers server 2012, and now they're stuck with windows 8.0 interface, and can't install IE11, so I have a permanently installed vulnerable browser. Also, it's just not as stable as 2012R2. Server manager crashes and won't recover without a reboot. I don't think I need to elaborate on Server 2008 R1 (Windows Vista Server) for anyone who's used it recently. I'm getting sick of being made to look stupid years later for installing the latest available OS at the time.