SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the does-that-include-emotional-support dept.
Microsoft has announced a new "Premium Assurance" plan for Windows Server and SQL Server.
Redmond currently offers five years of Mainstream Support on the aforementioned products, during which new features are added and updates are made for reasons of security or just to fix things up. Next comes five years of extended support, during which the security fixes and functionality tweaks keep flowing.
The new support offering will see bugs rated "critical" or "important" patched for the six-year duration of the Premium Assurance plan.
The outcome of the new plan is that operating systems like Windows Server 2008 R2 will now be supported until the year 2026. SQL Server 2008 can now be supported until 2025.
Microsoft's billing Premium Assurance as a comfort to those running applications that may not be easy to evaporate into a cloud. By offering extended support, Redmond reckons, you can just keep them running without worrying about migration.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Tuesday December 13 2016, @04:02PM
Not mentioned in the article, and not yet in the comments so far. Being from the Unix part of the world, I had no idea that there was such a thing as "2008R2" and had to look it up.
2008R2 is the server version of Windows 7, they share the same NT6.1 kernel and most of the userland. But with kind of sanitized settings out of the box. And a few little issues, like trouble with bluetooth, no sleep/suspend with HyperV on, installers failing after checking for Windows 7, and so on. I'm sure that will be now sorted in no time now.
Effectively they are saying - hey, you can have 10 more years of Windows 7, but you gotta pay through the nose. Which might well be the least evil in quite a few situations. Mind you, even XP is scheduled to be undead 'til 2019 in its "Embedded PosReady 2009" guise, I wonder if that is might be extended by another 6 years through the announced plan.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Tuesday December 13 2016, @05:44PM
The issues you cite are not a problem on servers.
I can think of no company that wants to use bluetooth on a server, nor a server that will sleep or suspend while hosting VMs. They even sell a sort of Hyper V server that is designed to host VMs. 2008R2 does it if you tell it to, but it's purpose is to be a 24x7 general purpose server.
It's original mass-market intent has been designed away (Cloud!), but the holdouts are many. Local file and print services often are best, local authentication via active directory, redundant DNS and DHCP services and SQL clustering, etc. 2008R2 is good (heck, 2003R2 is good), never mind even if its 32bit or 64 bit. Both were winner server OSes for the types of businesses that needed them--and really nice overpowered home OSes, too.
But even then at home, I don't know of anyone that wants their server to go to sleep or use bluetooth. I mean -- it's a server! Running the server OS on a laptop or something because the user is cool or whatever, ok fine burn the license that way, but it's not a problem they seek to address. For that they have Windows 7 to complement the sales of Windows 2008R2.
But otherwise -- you also need to take into account that not many people will bother to pay through the nose. The businesses will entirely ignore all mandates pleas cries and demands to upgrade -- until something that costs them more money than upgrading happens and forces their hand to upgrade. Often it is when a client wants something and they risk the loss of a sale because their environment can't run direct-x 5 or something stupid that seems completely implausible from a business perspective that they never needed before and it's required to install some new version of the software they need to make the widgets required--even the demo requires it, and so they pay to upgrade. Then they find that the workstations need to get upgraded and now they have incompatbilities in other software packages because they waited so long, and...and after the upgrade, they find they didn't need anyway but the sales person didn't tell them that, they could have just installed it with the -legacy option.
Been there and seen that. It get people to switch to your suggested OS of choice--and I am right there beside them, but really would have liked to see them continue to use what they had. Everyone is much happier not having to change. Updates are fine--but the upgrades are not.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Tuesday December 13 2016, @06:12PM
The issues you cite are not a problem on servers.
I wrote that comment with the full consideration of "abusing" the "server" as a workstation. There are a few reasons (which I'm not going to repeat here) why Windows 10 might be a complete no-go, so this program might (or might not?) be a way to pay for a bit of time to think about what to do next.
(Fortunately, I'm not in that situation. But having mostly used Macs in the past, I now have to think what to do next as well, with that platform becoming ever more undesirable not only in software, but in hardware, too, while modern hardware still brings a lot of nasty surprises wrt to full Linux support.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15 2016, @11:46PM
> Not mentioned in the article, and not yet in the comments so far.
It was mentioned in comment #440661.