Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Moving To Per-Core Licensing (arstechnica.com) 288
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.
It's almost like a fetish (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Three original Stones still in the Stones (Score:2)
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.
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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.
Re:It's almost like a fetish (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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 netw
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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.
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Unfortunately that is not always an option. There are myriad reasons why, and while in many cases it
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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.
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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.
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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)
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> 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-... [microsoft.com]
e.g. x64 version
Windows 7 Professional 192 GB
Windows 7 Home Premium 16 GB
Windows 7 Home B
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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.
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Re:It's almost like a fetish (Score:5, Informative)
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?
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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 librari
Technical solutions to price fixing? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:It's almost like a fetish (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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 (Score:2)
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.
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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, y
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Re:It's almost like a fetish (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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This isn't even close to being complicated. MS was doing per-core licensing back when WindowsNT 3.1 was a thing.
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There were no multi-core x86 processors when 3.1 was a thing.
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Re: It's almost like a fetish (Score:2)
They did learn from Oracle.
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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.
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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 (Score:4, Funny)
Re: It's almost like a fetish (Score:2)
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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.
Cores? Packs? Sockets? (Score:3)
What do these mean?
Re:Cores? Packs? Sockets? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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
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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
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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 beside
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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? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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. Ess
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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? (Score:2)
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?
Long ago, before the cloud (Score:2)
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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?
AMD "modules" (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
Lol (Score:2, Informative)
My company moved from Windows to Linux. How many cores is that, Redmond?
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Any real tangible merits to using Windows Server? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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
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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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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...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 serv
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and as you realize web apps need security (Score:3)
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
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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 net
Tthat's starting to change. $100B spent on securit (Score:3)
> 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 Londo
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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
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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.
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Re:Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serve (Score:5, Funny)
I know there surely exist some advantages but what are they really?
Lack of SystemD isn't advantage enough?
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Everything else is worse than SysV init. Even Systemd, which is really bad.
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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.
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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
Re: Any real tangible merits to using Windows Serv (Score:2)
15 years ago if all you wanted was file and print then the best choice was Netware.
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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 w
Not surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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
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Vendor lock-in is the only explanation (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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
licensed by physical cores, not virtual cores. (Score:2)
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?
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In other words, Oracle licensing. (Score:2)
Not good there, not good here.
Disguised major price increase (Score:2)
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.
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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.
Increasing cores, declining VM host counts? (Score:2)
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.
So we pay for the pleasure of (Score:2)
Having to buy more cpus, which we only have to do because of their bloated system. Sounds legit.
Microsoft moving to per-core licensing .. (Score:3)
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.
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Rent seeking always sucks when you're the renter.
Intel/AMD Response (Score:2)
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
How does this help customers? (Score:2)
"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?
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This is specifically addressed in their FAQ (Q7): https://docs.google.com/viewer... [google.com]
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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.
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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 ne
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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
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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.
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Exchange and the surrounding ecosystem.
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In short, it starts around $800 before discounts.