The 'new' Microsoft? I still wouldn't touch them with a barge pole Microsoft makes a number of truly fantastic technologies and it is legitimately at the cutting edge of a number of hybrid cloud technologies. By the same token, Microsoft is also an asshat, so any attempt to make decisions about it gets complicated and messy in a right hurry. Unfortunately, as refreshes near, making sense of …
I think it's:
"Unfortunately, as clients get close to the point in their business cycle when they buy new hardware and/or software, I am often asked to help them understand what the current Microsoft product line is and how it can be used by the client's business to greatest effect."
If I am parsing Past Trevor correctly it is closer to
"Unfortunately, as clients get close to the point in their business cycle when they buy new hardware and/or software, I am often asked to help them understand what Microsoft's products and services currently are, what the licensing is like and - most importantly - what Microsoft's plans are for the future.
This includes having to assess the risks of staying with Microsoft as well as moving away from Microsoft, for new and existing workloads. Bearing in mind factors that go beyond just immediate technological considerations, such as long term concerns regarding licensing models, service existence, data sovereignty, ability to run workloads locally, lock-in, likelihood to want to move away from Microsoft at the next refresh, and whether it is better to eat the costs of moving now or defer them until later."
They encourage me to write short, however. Sorry if it didn't parse quite right. That Past Trevor guy; not always the best at things...
"It's hard to make purely technological arguments against Microsoft these days, and that's a good thing. They've come a long way in that regard and in doing so they have bettered the whole industry."
Yes, and just an example : NTFS, the one and only File System for W$ is obviously awesome compared to ALL the other FS out there!
That's of course not counting M$ still patent-trolling with the almost 50 years old FAT.
Seriously Trevor!
In the 2012 iteration? Files. I've found it a lot less butts than NTFS for large numbers of files.
The 2016 iteration has come a long way. Most notably in the advanced made for hosting VHDs. ReFS + Hyper-V is actually a decent combination. You know, if you use Hyper-V.
Also: Databases? They go in a VM. Preferably a Linux VM. ReFS should only really rear its head as a place to put files you need to share via SMB or as an underlying store for Hyper-V VMs.
Outside of that, Windows should really only be used inside VMs for legacy workloads that can't yet be migrated off. Those shouldn't be too complex or demanding. Some might be, I grant you, but most workloads can talk to files hosted on a network share or to a database hosted in another VM. Windows is for applications made by developers from the past. Nothing more.
Get your databases on a proper DB server and thus on a proper OS!
"Databases? They go in a VM"
Not in any large environment. Or for anything that needs licensing from Oracle.You would normally have an SQL Server (and maybe Oracle) cluster that hosted multiple databases with appropriately sized hardware. There is no gain to be had from virtualising such an already shared platform.
"Get your databases on a proper DB server and thus on a proper OS!"
Yep, SQL Server is the easy choice. My condolences for those still stuck with Oracle.
"First of all, a machine cannot boot off a ReFS partirion, it also doesn't work with databases"
"Users do need to be mindful that ReFS in its current iteration is not meant to be a replacement for NTFS. Instead, it is a complimentary file system, designed to handle tasks where NTFS falls short, such as file and data archival servers."
"Later versions of ReFS may very well replace NTFS as the default Windows file system, but it isn’t going to happen soon. After all, it took NTFS 8 years from its introduction until it became the default file system for consumers in Windows XP"
> That's of course not counting M$ still patent-trolling with the almost 50 years old FAT.
FAT12 in MS-DOS 1.x was 1981 which is only 35 years old, though 'Stand-Alone BASIC' was a year or two before that.
But the patent-trolling seems to be based on VFAT with the 'feature' of generating both 8.3 and long filenames. This is only 21 years old as it came out in Windows 95.
When not to trust the supplier?
1) When the license key stops the product from working unless you keep paying for it.
2) per call support costs. Who wants to handover a credit card number when your production server has gone down in the middle of the End-of-year processing and... well you know the rest.
3) Inability to speak to a real person who actually understands the product rather than someone from south India called Joe who can't really speak English even though they are reading from a script.
That enough to go on?
Personally, as retirement looms I am actually looking forward to the day when using anything to come out of Redmond is history. no windows, Ribbon, forced updates and all that other other crappiness. Yes, there is life after microsoft and a good one at that.
"1) When the license key stops the product from working unless you keep paying for it."
Unless it's O365 or some other "cloud product", I'm not aware of MS products ceasing to work when the license expires.
"2) per call support costs."
The prices are per incident, not per call.
What competing products do you use where you get free phone support?
"3) Inability to speak to a real person who actually understands the product rather than someone from south India called Joe who can't really speak English even though they are reading from a script."
My experiences with MS phone support haven't (yet) been transferred to Far East. The last person I received support from was actually a Dane who spoke English fluently. I'm sure MS has call centres in India too. YMMV and so forth.
My experiences with MS phone support have almost exclusively been transferred to the far east. Namely: every single time I want to exercise downgrade rights. That's two hours per bloody key, every time.
Similarly, Office 365 support is always front-ended by admittedly quite friendly folks with accents that I sadly have trouble understanding, and who seem to have trouble understanding me. We talk enough to exchange e-mails, and then things proceed forward, albeit very, very slowly. The same issues occur with MSDN and Microsoft Network support, especially when it is something like "your billing doesn't understand the fact that I am part of two separate organizations and my Action Pack won't let me renew". Etc.
The only time I can remember ever having gotten someone who spoke an English dialect from one of the Five Eyes countries was when I called in for LCS support, shortly after the acquisition.
MS support might eventually solve many of the problems presented to them, but I cannot say I've had good luck actually communicating with them, nor have they been particularly expeditious. That said, they're huge, and it could just be luck of the draw with me...
My name is ...... I said ..... ok, ok,... foxtrot, romeo, alpha, november, er, er, the eleventh letter of the alphabet ..... no, not the seventh, the eleventh. Yes, it has happened, more than once. They sounded American but I suspect that they merely learned 'English' from American tutors or (more likely) watched many American tv series.
> They sounded American but I suspect that they merely learned 'English' from American tutors or (more likely) watched many American tv series.
Poor folks in India. At least the Japanese have Ellen Baker (http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ellen-baker-new-horizon) to teach them English.
"My experiences with MS phone support have almost exclusively been transferred to the far east. Namely: every single time I want to exercise downgrade rights. That's two hours per bloody key, every time."
That's NOT professional support. That's license admin.
Professional support is accessible here if you don't have a subscription / other support options:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/gp/offerprophone?wa=wsignin1.0
In many Microsoft support calls over a number of years I have never had anyone who didn't speak English fluently.
"Why should license admin not be considered a support task?"
The service he was using is a consumer focused service. Enterprises usually use MAK keys and have no normal need to make such transfers. There IS a professional support option for license admin via the Microsoft Licensing Portal and associated services but again those are always fluently English speaking.
Anyway, personal license transfers are not in anyway part of Microsoft Professional Support (which is usually chargeable per incident).
> In many Microsoft support calls over a number of years I have never had anyone who didn't speak English fluently.
I have had many phone calls from Microsoft Support saying that they have detected a problem in my machine* and they can fix it. They all have had strong Asian accents and haven't been fluent in English.
* Interestingly, I don't run Windows though.
Interestingly, when the scammers are asked point-blank if they're calling from Microsoft they get a bit jumpy, and hedge around the question: they say things like "We are the Windows Support Department", but hesitate actually to lie about being Microsoft(R). I guess that Microsoft's lawyers are a bit scary, even in Mumbai.
"I guess that Microsoft's lawyers are a bit scary, even in Mumbai."
A requirement of trademarks is that you should defend them. If you fail to do that you lose them.
The odd thing is that if you use the Microsoft mail service under one of its ever-changing brand names the spam with the lowest probability of being filtered out is that purporting to come from themselves and yet it's the spam they should have the greatest success with - they should be able to find out whether they sent it. If they were ever taking misuse of their trademarks to court this lackadaisical approach to passing-off attempts which they could control would provide a stack of evidence against them
I've gotten a few of those calls. I egg them on saying something like "Oh... that sounds serious. Tell me more." After wasting several minutes of their time, I tell them I don't use Windows, that they don't have a clue about my system, and laugh and laugh until they hang up. Then their phone number goes into my call blocker application.
"It IS free if it's found to be a fault or bug in Microsoft software - the incident is credited back."
YMMV because that hinges on getting them to accept that there is a fault in their product. I haven't been too lucky with that, although in fairness to MS they did acknowledge the bugs years later as a result of being used as an exploit. :(
My recollection is that with both HP and Sun (later Oracle) we had unlimited support, paid for on an annual subscription for both hardware and software. We cheaped out and bought only 0800-1700 local time, though, and there was a per-incident charge for after hours and weekends. I think the 24x7 support rates were about double, and over about 15 years the question came up only once, so we won on the deal. Calling them off hours would have violated the Anti-Deficiency Act, and we thought things through carefully and fixed the problem ourselves, the alternative being to wait until morning and take a hit for customer down time.
" I am actually looking forward to the day when using anything to come out of Redmond is history."
I don't think all that ass-hattery is exclusive to Redmond. I don't know that Apple is much better. Nor Firefox. And I recently (finally) tried CentOS 7 with all the foolishness that is systemd and grub2, and I have to say that feels strongly like something Redmond would do. In fact, RH's decisions make me sad now. I used to enjoy being a Linux admin when it was more unixy, but this new systemd thing is the pits, and grub2 has a config file that's stupidly long and complicated for just a boot loader. And worse, that stuff is so deeply embedded in the distro now that it's near impossible to rip-n-replace. So we've finally come to the point where my favorite Linux distro is no longer about choice, it's about doing things ONE way and doing them poorly.
It seems like the entire computer industry is in motion to "Do What It Wants To Do" and fuck any and all of us admins who don't agree or don't want to do it that way. Hell, it's not just admins, it's ANY competent computer user. I guess the money is big enough now for all these companies that they don't give a shit about those of us on the "outside" who got them to where they are today. Microsoft was just one of the early companies to get to that point back in the mid-90's. Now the rest are catching up. Sad.
I'm happily avoiding Microsith for the most part. When I can't do otherwise, I'll use their stuff – in a VM if that's practical, or on borrowed hardware otherwise.
Regarding systemd and grub, well… I wonder if Red Hat have some Hat Red of the old ways. I'm still using sysvinit and lilo; and Devuan, being a mere sideways step away from Debian, is looking tempting.
It's going to be awhile before it's fully up to speed, but check out Devuan for Int freedom!
Run by a bunch of people who hate being told they have to change everything just to accomodate somebody's commercial support plans.
It's getting near impossible these days to have an OS where you know what is going on at boot or for that matter when it is running.
https://devuan.org
Try out the BSD's. I've gone from CentOS 6.x, to 7 (ugh), then veered into FreeBSD instead.
There are some command differences to get used to, but they're pretty minor. Things on whole are just a lot simpler, and pretty much "just work". Like it should be.
BSDs - I'd thought about that, but hadn't seriously pursued it. Had also thought about Slackware, but are they even still a thing? The latest version I saw in their ISO download area was from like Sept. 2013, but maybe I was looking in the wrong place.
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