Posts by CLD

Re: Cores n sockets and a license to print money...

I hope this help you...

The "per-core" licensing model has been around for a while, it kicked in for the Windows Server operating system when Server 2016 come out.

The reason for this is that that Microsoft was missing out on revenue. The old licensing covered you for two sockets (so in your example above, you would have needed two licenses to cover a 4 socket server). Because of this, people tried limiting their servers to two sockets with as many cores as possible.

Microsoft amend their structure with the justification that in aligned their Online Azure licensing (which is per core) with their on-prem licensing, thereby allowing businesses to make a better comparison.

The new licenses are still tied to two sockets. A pack of 16 core licenses is pretty much the same price as one of the old 2 socket licenses. The 16 core licenses can be spread across 2 sockets. You can also purchase 2 core add-on packs. Therefore you have the option of purchasing 2x16core packs (approximately the same price as before) or a 16core pack a 6x2core packs, which should provide a saving.

With SQL Server licening I believe you have two options, license the host (28 cores in your case) or license the VM (4 cores). The latter can mean you move out of license compliance if someone bumps up the number of cores assigned to your VM, but that is something you need to deal with internally. Licensing the host allows unlimited SQL servers to be run on the host. When licensing virtual servers, a minimum of 4 cores have to be licensed regardless.

This should help: https://download.microsoft.com/download/7/8/C/78CDF005-97C1-4129-926B-CE4A6FE92CF5/SQL_Server_2017_Licensing_guide.pdf

Re: ... we know mass enterprise adoption is still to come - ?

"How confident are "we" about this?"

Intel will be releasing their Kaby Lake processors in the coming months.. Microsoft will only support Windows 10 on that silicon. If you are a business and buy a PC from one of the big players (Lenovo, Dell, HP) it will have a Kaby Lake processor in it soon enough. If you do an annual refresh of your PC's, you're probably going to have to move to Windows 10 (if you want support).

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2016/01/15/windows-10-embracing-silicon-innovation/#FzD1OFriEbAMCFm5.97

Also, businesses which wish to keep their PC's with a supported Windows OS, have until 14th Jan 2020 to replace all their Win7 devices. We are getting very close to the 3 years to go mark. With businesses now frequently running a 20% annual replacement cycle, they are going to have to start moving soon.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/search?alpha=windows%207

Regarding your second question, AFAIK it works in this manner: Printers require drivers to be installed on each system to tell the applications how to print. The drivers have direct access to the kernel of the system. There are group policies which businesses can use to restrict access to only named print servers, but many businesses will just enable any domain related device to be a print server.

Not too hard (especially with physical access to a PC) to install and share some printers. These could be malicious drivers which, if someone connects to your shared printer, you've got code to interact with the kernel of their system - basically you could take ownership of it.

Re: Paper techs......

Yet I have seen too many IT Administrators which could not be bothered getting their certs, making completely misguided decisions based on a lack of knowledge. A bit of basic training would have helped in each of those situations. I have seen businesses paying heaps in lost purchasing none-required services, outages or over consumption because the IT staff did not know how to support the basic Windows Server environment which would have come by having certified staff.

Certs are not worthless, they are merely a benchmark upon which to weigh up the skills of prospective employees. Experience can be worthless too... I have see people doing the same job for 10 years, never looking at how it can be done better, not certified, just plodding... I have seen other people meet challenge after challenge, being mentored, getting heaps of professional development and adding heaps of value to the organisations they work for.

Experience and Certs go great hand in hand, one without the other can mean there is something lacking...

Re: er, people ARE forced to use Microsoft software...

"If you work for a big company, management are just TOO frightened to NOT use microsoft..."

I completely disagree, I have seen businesses use other products, moving away from MS because of the cost and then coming back because the staff ultimately request it, they notice a hit to their productivity, or they have other more valuable, third party apps which the business needs which are built on top of the MS tech.

The cost of moving away from MS products pales compared to the cost of moving away from all the key business applications which ride on the back of that technology.

"when we switched to the latest Office, this poor IT guy, here, had to go round and enable not just compatibility mode, but styles and fonts that everyone used, so letters still were standard..."

Really, this should have been tested and planned as part of the roll-out. The compatibility mode could have been done via group policy. Not sure about the styles and fonts, but pretty sure there would have been ways to roll that out as part of the deployment.

Re: Yay!

I love the Ribbon - going back to the god awful file menu structure hurts.... it's archaic and was retired for a lot of valid reasons.

Re: Silly sod

"Why is that? Is Autism increasing, or are people arrested for crimes rushing into a diagnosis they think might help them get off with a lighter punishment?"

Probably a little from Column A and a little from Column B...

One thing I find interesting, is that studies show that kids from parents with technical backgrounds are more likely to have Autism (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-geeky-couples-more-likely-to-have-kids-with-autism/). I would suggest that it is a form of natural selection / evolution whereby the offspring are genetically predisposed to reinforce certain traits which helped the parents / grandparents whilst neglecting others (e.g. Intense Focus on problems but loss of social awareness). More and more of us are living technical careers, so I could see this issue increasing in future.

Re: A possible explanation

I suppose adding to this, a number of our staff are grabbing some of the old machines with Vista Business licenses and buying SSD's and a Windows 8 upgrade license and building media centre's out of them... I've seen one and it works great.

Re: And what have we learned Microsoft?

I'm afraid the "people just simply like the XP interface" hence they don't upgrade is a bit of a fail... more real world, is that most people and businesses are trying hard not to spend money and have failed to budget for the replacements.

The other reason it is a fail, is because lots of businesses and home users still run applications which work on Windows XP, but do not port nicely to Windows 7 or Windows 8. 16 bit apps working within XP is one example.

I'm in the middle of a migration of a business at the moment and some applications we just can't port. The $$$ were not in the budget to buy new instances of the software that support a newer OS, so they will be staying for a little while yet. Hopefully we can slip the money into next years budget.

Windows 7 is not going to cause any real anxiety due to the change in interface, but the code underneath is suitably different to mean some applications just don't port nicely and it may cost you $$$ to upgrade or migrate.

Re: Not going to give it away for free

With Office365, now that its a subscription, the turn around for add-on features is quicker rather than slower. In the past, MS had about three years to code and test all their office updates and release them in a big hit. With Office 365, MS is releasing updates and upgrades on a monthly cycle... a considerable difference considering all the compatibility testing they need to do for each change.

Re: We are making it simpler

The changes are because most people are leveraging a virtual environment today... consider:

"What extra 25% value are we getting?" - each Windows Server Standard License now allows you to run two VM's rather than one... There's double the value there.

"a windows server should be per CPU only" - in a virtualised world, would you license the virtual CPU as well? If you are oversubscibing your server CPU's, would you pay for each of them multiple times? If you are running VMware on your server or some other non-MS hypervisor, how do you see that working? Would you go sockets, cores or threads?

Re: This will either save PC gaming or kill it.

I don't think this will do either, but it may dilute the console market place a bit more... The reason i don't think this will kill PC gaming, is that some games just don't work nicely on a console - for instance, I like to play the Civilisation games, these would be terrible on a console under a TV.

Not sure if the market will happily fit four consoles (Xbox, Playstation, Wii and SteamBox)...

I hope they understand that a console is so much more than a gaming device... it is a media hub. Most console owners i know use it more to watch videos and play music than they do with games. As long as this device has a good media centre interface then they should be onto a winner.

Re: "Most" enterprises "want" hybrid cloud??

MS have dumped their Enterprise Edition Licenses. Standard Edition Server Licenses now allow you to run 2 VM's. If you run Data Center 2012 R2 on the host, the 2012 R2 VM's are VM aware and smart enough to read the hosts License Key and do not prompt you for licensing.

Re: It could have been so good... :(

With Windows you can choose the UI, it just doesn't come out the box... I've used Aston Shell in the past which was quite sleek, there are other third party add-ons / extensions to change the look and feel too (Wincustomise and Classic Shell for Win8 are two examples). Windows is foundational... it is designed to be built upon, like almost all MS products. If it doesn't meet your requirements, go hunting, there are probably already extensions out there to meet your needs.

Re: Worse things

Being concerned with the rollout of the 2007 Office suite for an organiseation, I needed to both understand and "sell" its feature to the business... Key to this was the Ribbon interface. The Ribbon was innovative and represented change - change is often resisted, but with some training, videos, explainations and mentoring, people tend to embrace the change rather than resist it.

I feel for those businesses that have IT staff that just swap out the product without providing training. I have enough stories of IT staff coming through and upgrading all staff PC's to the later versions of office without consultation and support. This causes frustration and resistance and has little to do with the end product.

When Microsoft went to market to ask for the features people (businesses and customers) wanted in the 2007 version, over 90% of the featured existed, they just didn't know where to find them. That was what forced the radical redesign. The design worked, features are generally easier to find and not hidden in layers of Menu, Options, Tab, New Window, new tab and option.

I see it as a good thing that Microsoft is trying to be innovative... they are between a rock and a hard place - innovate too much, people complain. Don't innovate enough, people complain. Most of the time, the market leader can rest on their laurels and let the industry try to catch up... in this case and the case with Windows 8, Microsoft had the leading market share and was still innovating.