4 ms·

This doesn't surprise me overmuch. The foot in the door is Office 365 Enterprise, which comes with AD in Azure for free. From there, it's natural to setup a VPN

by teilo 9y ago

This doesn't surprise me overmuch. The foot in the door is Office 365 Enterprise, which comes with AD in Azure for free. From there, it's natural to setup a VPN to your Azure environment. With that in place, competitive pricing, and better compliance tools (such as host-external session-based flow monitoring) it becomes an attractive solution. Tie that to experience with Hyper-V. Companies like mine who have unused Hyper-V capacity due to Microsoft's ridiculous VM licensing scheme for Windows, tend to run Linux instances on that extra capacity. The high performance of Linux on Hyper-V was an eye-opener for us. I could see us using Azure for Linux. That said, we are 99% AWS, and I don't see our online platform ever moving from them.

UnoriginalGuy 9y ago
> Microsoft's ridiculous VM licensing scheme for Windows Microsoft offers at least three different ways to license Windows to run on a VM in-house. Core count, instance count, or site. Are all three "ridiculous?" None of Microsoft's license types require a certain Hyper-V capacity. In fact the whole "we were required to over-allocate Hyper-V so run Linux on the spare capacity" claim makes no sense.
- a2tech 9y ago
  Yes, they're all ridiculous. Also their licensing model is so hideously complex even different license advisors from Microsoft will give you different answers as to what you need. The only way you feel comfortable being fully in compliance with licensing is by massively overbuying. Its a ridiculous burden to place on a business.
- teilo 9y ago
  There is no such thing as instance or site pricing for Windows Server. Where are you getting that from? There is only core licensing, and you have to license all cores in a hypervisor, 16 minimum, and then you can only run two Windows Server instances unless you re-licensing all cores on the host a second time. The exception to that rule is Datacenter edition, which is only cost effective for large businesses running high-density servers. (7.5x the price for the same number of cores vs. Standard.) http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/2/9/7290EA05-DC56-4BED-9400-138C5701F174/WS2016LicensingDatasheet.pdf http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/2/9/7290EA05-DC56-4...
Aloha 9y ago
Yeah, I came here to mention Linux on Hyper-V - the performance is great, the free version, while painful to setup, its extremely low friction to keep running.
- rbanffy 9y ago
  I had nothing but pain with Hyper-V hosting Linux, to the point we joked it came with Chaos Monkey built in. Volumes would become read-only for no good reason, VMs would reboot... At least, when we moved to AWS, our software was exquisitely resilient, with multiple levels of degraded functionality everywhere.
  - Aloha 9y ago
    I've never really had any issues with it, and I'm doing stuff I consider to be a little esoteric, like volume passthru.
    - teilo 9y ago
      That's not so much esoteric as old-school. When VHD was the only other option, it was the standard way of getting decent performance out of iSCSI or large direct-attached volums. But with VHDX, passthrough gains you so little that it's not worth losing the ability to checkpoint volumes and do agentless backups.
      - Aloha 9y ago
        My use case had to do with migrating a physical machine to a virtualized one, in this case migrating the whole array over (with its controller) was less risk fraught (and notably faster) than creating a new drive, and copying. It also creates an isolation layer between windows and my files. Sometime in the next couple years I'll likely migrate it to a vhdx, but this was quick and easy to setup.
        teilo 9y ago
        Physical to VHDX migration is a PITA. I've done it in an emergency, but it's not ideal. You can convert a raw drive image to VHD using the now-obsolete VHDTool, and from there convert to VHDX. But the resulting volume is not dynamic. It appears to have no way to know which sectors are in use when the conversion is done this way, so it assumes all of them are, and the image cannot be shrunk. The better option is to copy all contents to a new VHDX image using a utility instance. A lot more work, of course.

by teilo 9y ago

UnoriginalGuy 9y ago

> Microsoft's ridiculous VM licensing scheme for Windows Microsoft offers at least three different ways to license Windows to run on a VM in-house. Core count, instance count, or site. Are all three "ridiculous?" None of Microsoft's license types require a certain Hyper-V capacity. In fact the whole "we were required to over-allocate Hyper-V so run Linux on the spare capacity" claim makes no sense.

a2tech 9y ago
Yes, they're all ridiculous. Also their licensing model is so hideously complex even different license advisors from Microsoft will give you different answers as to what you need. The only way you feel comfortable being fully in compliance with licensing is by massively overbuying. Its a ridiculous burden to place on a business.
teilo 9y ago
There is no such thing as instance or site pricing for Windows Server. Where are you getting that from? There is only core licensing, and you have to license all cores in a hypervisor, 16 minimum, and then you can only run two Windows Server instances unless you re-licensing all cores on the host a second time. The exception to that rule is Datacenter edition, which is only cost effective for large businesses running high-density servers. (7.5x the price for the same number of cores vs. Standard.) http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/2/9/7290EA05-DC56-4BED-9400-138C5701F174/WS2016LicensingDatasheet.pdf http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/2/9/7290EA05-DC56-4...

Aloha 9y ago

Yeah, I came here to mention Linux on Hyper-V - the performance is great, the free version, while painful to setup, its extremely low friction to keep running.

rbanffy 9y ago
I had nothing but pain with Hyper-V hosting Linux, to the point we joked it came with Chaos Monkey built in. Volumes would become read-only for no good reason, VMs would reboot... At least, when we moved to AWS, our software was exquisitely resilient, with multiple levels of degraded functionality everywhere.
- Aloha 9y ago
  I've never really had any issues with it, and I'm doing stuff I consider to be a little esoteric, like volume passthru.
  - teilo 9y ago
    That's not so much esoteric as old-school. When VHD was the only other option, it was the standard way of getting decent performance out of iSCSI or large direct-attached volums. But with VHDX, passthrough gains you so little that it's not worth losing the ability to checkpoint volumes and do agentless backups.
    - Aloha 9y ago
      My use case had to do with migrating a physical machine to a virtualized one, in this case migrating the whole array over (with its controller) was less risk fraught (and notably faster) than creating a new drive, and copying. It also creates an isolation layer between windows and my files. Sometime in the next couple years I'll likely migrate it to a vhdx, but this was quick and easy to setup.
      - teilo 9y ago
        Physical to VHDX migration is a PITA. I've done it in an emergency, but it's not ideal. You can convert a raw drive image to VHD using the now-obsolete VHDTool, and from there convert to VHDX. But the resulting volume is not dynamic. It appears to have no way to know which sectors are in use when the conversion is done this way, so it assumes all of them are, and the image cannot be shrunk. The better option is to copy all contents to a new VHDX image using a utility instance. A lot more work, of course.