As an integrator, I've barely started seeing Win2012 in production last year, so it will be another 5 years before I can start playing with these new toys. Hell, some people are still chugging along with 2003sp2... and I'm talking Big Business, not some godforsaken countryside school.
The fact businesses are extending the life of systems not because they are unwilling to invest in upgrades but because they work just fine is a sign that the industry has reached a good level of maturity. It's a good thing. We should all be working collectively to solve new problems instead of reiterating over the same problems again and again.
In the old days of NT4 a 4-year old system would accumulate maintenance costs. Today, Windows 2003 is 13 years old and still pretty serviceable.
I'd be more worried about businesses accumulating unsustainable technical debt than accumulating old (but stable) technologies.
One might argue that it's insane to run a 13 year old OS that is not getting security updates any more at your business.
In an ideal world, operating systems (server and desktop alike) would already be on a 5-year release cycle with just yearly incremental upgrades in between (as much as the vendor can manage in a service-pack model).
Is it insane to run systems without any security updates? Even within the lifecycle of the product many businesses never even patch after the initial install. I personally know people that live by this: never patch anything unless presented with proof that it's necessary to do so (I don't completely agree with this, but money has been lost catering for low-impact security updates and people tend to learn a few lessons from it).
Security is more about risk management than being free of vulnerabilities. The issue isn't going by without security updates, is doing so without assessing the risk.
Unless you're maintaining Server 2003 itself, at which point it comes with 13 years worth of problems.
I'd think this is for the same reason XP lasted so long --- it's a good stable platform free of all the hassles and complexities of the ones that came after it. A lot of home users are already quite disturbed by the privacy implications of Windows 10, and if anything big businesses would be even more cautious of the same for its server counterpart.
[0]: https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/03/30/ubuntu-on-windows-the...
I would say it is easier to just spin up an Ubuntu instance than to use Ubuntu on Windows on the server. What are some use cases that you're thinking of? Am I missing something?
I fail to see the benefit of using Windows on the server unless you need Windows. Even Microsoft send to acknowledge that. I must be missing something.
Although I find a lot of the Azure services a bit too low-level, it's been very easy to build simpler interfaces on top of them, and get a lot done quickly. If this is anywhere near as nice on Azure as what the Joyent cloud's docker support looks like, it could be very interesting indeed.
I look forward if it can help OCaml as well, given their acquisition of Unikernel Systems.
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OSEs/Hyper-V containers
DataCenter: Unlimited
Standard: 2
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Windows Server containers
Datacenter: Unlimited
Standard: Unlimited
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[0] - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/products/window...
Trying to keep track of Windows licensing compliance across multiple versions and deployment models is confusing enough as it is. Different sources will give different answers to the same questions when interpreting licensing scenarios, and you can never know unless you get audited (?)
1.) Containers are not available on desktop SKUs. So there is no licensing consideration for Windows 10. If they later add containers to Windows 10, then they'll release licensing rules at that time.
2.) If you are running a server OS for your desktop, then the licensing is pretty clear. Hyper-v VM containers follow the same rules as normal hyper-v VMs (1 physical + 2 virtual for standard then each additional VM requires a license, unlimited for datacenter). For Windows Server Containers (which are not hyper-v based), it's even easier, it's unlimited regardless of edition.
3.) As always, the host OS must be licensed fully in order to have the appropriate rights (2016 is moving to core licensing, with a minimum of 8 core licenses per processor, and a minimum of 2 processors).
All in all, it's one of the easier features to understand the licensing for since it doesn't directly deal with CALs or internal/external usage rights.
I would assume that also applies to VMs or containers.
Licenses for Windows Server generally convey some rights for virtualization. https://hyperv.veeam.com/blog/virtualization-rights-windows-...
Multi-platform seems like a good direction to go in, so it might be a worthwhile tradeoff.
