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

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.

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.

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: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: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: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.

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.