Microsoft pledges Linux boost for Windows Server and Center R2 duo Microsoft has vowed Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2 will be the “best” platform for running Linux in the cloud. Microsoft shops departing from the faith and running Linux will get a “consistent” experience on a par with its beloved Windows, Redmond promised. The software giant made the pledge to persuade …
Unix admins most certainly do make purchasing decisions. IT managers and executives don't just pop out of the ether. Linux is a well established server operating system for Fortune 100 companies as is the entire Unix family.
Outside of mom and pop shops, the reach of Microsoft is limited.
"Outside of mom and pop shops, the reach of Microsoft is limited"
Hmm, that's your credibility blown, then. You've got it the wrong way round:
Administrators don't make purchasing decisions, outside of Mom'n'pop outfits and Fortune 500/FTSE100 companes have something like a 99% use of MS. Just because a company uses UNIX, doesn't mean they don't use MS, I have never even anecdotally heard of a non-heterogeneous company at this size.
In 30+ years of dealing with enterprise type software I have never found a UNIX/Linux admin ever make a purchasing decision. Maybe influence a decision, but never the final decision on which their reputation and the company's reputation rests. Equally never a Windows admin either. Different breeds of people.
If is a 10 user company maybe – but over 100 users – never.
"Unix admins most certainly do make purchasing decisions."
They might get to order the occasional new Boat Anchor, but most enterprise IT strategy decisions get made by people with more up-to-date skills sets these days...
Hyper-V Server as the Hypervisor makes more sense than Linux - it is much more secure with far fewer vulnerabilities, a much smaller attack surface, has a lower TCO, has better management and monitoring tools, more powerful remote scripting via Powershell and it scales better (e..g 1 million IOPS in a single VM a year ago).
Linux also still has to bolt the Hypervisor inside the Kernel, whereas Hyper-V Server is a proper distinct Hypervisor layer like vSphere.
This is why, whenever I patch any box, Windows, UNIX, Linux, etc, I reboot it in the scheduled downtime. I'd far rather reboot something having made changes in scheduled down time than find that it won't reboot when something goes wrong and I've got unscheduled downtime.
"With the downtime of Windows for reboots etc."
Hyper-V Server is a separate product from Windows Server, and it doesn't include Windows. The full featured product is also free.
And unless you use a hack like Oracle's Ksplice, then Linux tends to require far more reboots than Windows Server if you patch immediately on release of critical vulnerabilities....
"And unless you use a hack like Oracle's Ksplice, then Linux tends to require far more reboots than Windows Server if you patch immediately on release of critical vulnerabilities"
Bull s---. Linux only needs to be rebooted when updating the kernel. Everything else being updated on linux does not require a reboot. Compared to Windows update mostly require a reboot after updates. Also on Windows often will act up if you do not reboot after updates. To make matters worse Windows often needs to be rebooted after installing applications, not so on linux.
@AC01:00 - This reboot fixation is rather odd. If you're not in a production environment, it doesn't really matter if you need to reboot or not. If you are in a production environment, you won't be patching while the system is live and my experiences with Ubuntu in particular say that even if you don't need to reboot - and you quite often do - you should be rebooting because you need to know if they've ballsed up the update and it won't reboot. This has happened twice to me with updates in the last couple of years and across three different hardware platforms I run Ubuntu on. You simply don't want to be discovering you can't reboot your machine down the line when you're either dealing with a production incident or you've installed a different update that does need a reboot.
"Linux only needs to be rebooted when updating the kernel. Everything else being updated on linux does not require a reboot"
Right - and have you seen how many known Linux kernel vulnerabilities there are - well over 900! That's nearly double the total known vulnerabilities in the whole Windows XP OS (or about half the number in OS-X!)
And that's not even allowing for functionality fixes, driver updates, etc....
Damn right VMWare are your competition.
I'm not claiming some major enterprise success here, but I just tried getting a Windows 3.1 program of mine to work. Ended up having to install Linux on a VM and then use Wine (irony level set to maximum). Windows 7 64-bit wouldn't touch it.
And for the last month or two, I have been moving an Eclipse workspace of mine over to Linux. Nothing huge, just 100,000 lines of C over a hundred or so files. By the time I faff about with MinGW, Cygwin, hunting down a GCC for Windows-> ARM cross-compilation, and all the other junk just to do a cross-compile, it was easier to run a Linux VM under Windows and use "Unity Mode" so that Linux programs appear to be native Windows apps. And my compile times dropped like a stone compared to native Windows Eclipse attempting the same feat, even though I only allocate 2 of 8 cores to the VM. God knows how that works - presumably Linux is just better set up to handle thousands of small files.
Also did all my test deployments of Windows 8 (new personal best of 2 hours from install to unrecoverable problem - somehow managed to put it on the domain but in a way that it refused both domain and non-domain logins and had no way to change it back) using VMWare, no way was I going to risk my personal machine on the free upgrade to 8 Pro I was given because I bought my laptop at the right time.
Not sure I'll be able to live without VMWare in the future and, fact is, once I go down that path, if the host is Linux or it's Windows, it really doesn't make any difference. So it might as well be Linux, just to save the licensing hassle. Next time I buy a PC, I will go for VMWare from the start, and that would mean a Linux install first and Windows as a second-class VM citizen for when it's required.
Servers moved that way years ago. It's now stupidly viable on the desktop. Hell, what the machine runs anymore isn't even limiting in terms of the apps you can put into the OS. My Ubuntu Eclipse is barely visible on my Windows desktop, and only because I left the VMWare signature window tag so I don't accidentally get confused between it and my Windows install.
Quite why MS expects I'd pay for a MS licence of any kind to run Linux, I can't fathom. Surely if I really want to go down the VM route in terms of a datacenter, it's just easier to go the other way around from the very start?
>I'd like to reserve the right to try to have a serious discussion on matters MS and Linux related on the Register...
>I know, it's an aspiration, but this polarised tribalism really gets on my wick.
Yet you won't even post your little marketing burps without the cover of being AC. Please go away RICHTO. This endless whining hypocrisy is getting on MY wick.
I realise everyone needs to make a living but can't you find a more honest, respectable job suited to your particular talent? Lawyer, politician, used car salesman, telesales, insurance agent... there must be something out there for you.
I'm not RICHTO, who would fall into my definition of someone who can't seriously this subject discuss for exactly the same reasons as people who seem to perceive any suggestion that their chosen OS isn't perfect and all the others aren't utter rubbish as a personal attack. Especially when this results in them making personal attacks back. Wit: You suggest that someone is an anonymous shill, because you don't agree with you. Grow up.
Many of us have perfectly good reasons for posting AC, such as personal privacy and the fact that we're commenting about core areas which our companies work in and we're not toeing the company line. Personally I work for a very big IT hardware/software vendor who is majorly into FOSS. Commenting about our competitors could leave me in serious trouble if I did it with my real name.
@Miek - Exactly what is wrong with writing software for a living?
It's great if you do something and you want to give it away, but suggesting that there is something wrong with selling software is a bit off. Some people do have to feed themselves and the skills they have to do it are programming.
Some people don't object to paying for software...
True enough. Even I, as a Linux geek, don't object to paying for software. I do, however, object to paying a company for the privilege of running software that was written and given away by someone else when there is a less expensive, or even free, solution that is just as good for running said software.
Step 2) once there is a customer base, invent and charge for a boatload of CALs, for management tools, for servers, for cloud connections / for local connections, which when all combined add 30 per month per user or whatever our sales department think "what price the market will bear".
You'd wonder why some game company hasn't tried to write an alternative Exchange server + client for SME. Would have though that there is a better return at less risk than a AAA title.
"2) Charge a licensing fee for each VM."
Nope - Hyper-v is completely free to use. With all features included like replication, software defined networking, etc..
.You only need to license your guest OSs. Which of course will be more expensive than using Windows Server if you choose to use a supported enterprise Linux version....
Probably because you're a Windows house and you have a requirement for a modest amount of Linux to be run in your environment. Or because VMware is going to cost your company more than Hyper-V.
In any case, Hyper-v has excellent performance, I run Linux boxes on both it and VMware and I can't tell the difference between the two.
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