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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.
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.
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?
What do these mean?
My company moved from Windows to Linux. How many cores is that, Redmond?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I know there surely exist some advantages but what are they really?
Lack of SystemD isn't advantage enough?
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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. ;)
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.
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.
Exchange and the surrounding ecosystem.
*sigh* back to work...
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).
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
http://saveie6.com/
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.