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I'm rather saddened by this. As an infrastructure engineer, TechNet has been perfect for building demo labs and proof-of-concepts. In my home virtualization en

I'm rather saddened by this. As an infrastructure engineer, TechNet has been perfect for building demo labs and proof-of-concepts. In my home virtualization environment, I love the ability to throw up a domain today, a SQL cluster tomorrow, wipe it all out the next day and build it all back up again. Losing that flexibility will be rough. Getting eval keys from say, VMware, with their 30-60 day timers means picking and choosing what I want to try playing with when, and feeling SOL if some interruption comes about in which I'm not able to use the time to the fullest. I'm pressured to their schedule, and not my own, and damned if I want to revisit something or simply learn at my own pace. It was a great way to simply buy into the Microsoft ecosystem and familiarize ones self with a whole range of products with no fuss. MSDN is a much more expensive proposition, and while ideal for the development community, not geared for those of us who's experience is in deploying solutions and performing integration. I suspect this was a move to help close a loophole in which technet licenses were used in production environment, and that's a fair assertion to make. But being forced to eval in a sterile "Free Lab" is no substitute. I really think this is a unnecessary move to close what has been one of Microsoft's best programs at promoting adoption.

toyg 13y ago
Same here. Today, I can build a test image with version X of software Y in preparation for an engagement, then archive the image; 18 months later, when customers come back with an issue, I can fire up that image and figure out fairly quickly what "fabulous customization" they've done that broke my setup. In the cloud, this exercise would likely cost me $$$ every month, since I'd have to keep around hundreds of GB of virtual volumes. Clearly I have to rethink my workflow, or I could go back to piracy, like I used to when I was a penniless minion. Microsoft: finding more ways to be hated and irrelevant since 2003.
- incision 13y ago
  >In the cloud, this exercise would likely cost me $$$ every month, since I'd have to keep around hundreds of GB of virtual volumes. Personally, I'd rather pay some cloud provider a few dozen dollars per month to hang on to a bunch of volumes and snapshots that I can access/redeploy trivially from anywhere than maintain all the same in my home.
  - toyg 13y ago
    I guess I'm special: most of my engagements drop me on-site without real connectivity (even 3g is often poor). But yeah, I see your point. As a company, we're a bit behind on the whole AWS thing, mostly because of fear of ungodly bills at the end of the month. Funnily enough, I'm the only one here trying to actually use it.
  - ckozlowski 13y ago
    I'm tempted to go this route in the future instead of the home ESXi server I run. I realize this is probably a bit unique compared to most, but a lot of what I do in my instance is build private clouds for customers. AWS is great, but their infrastructure is already built; its the end stage at which most of the heavy lifting has already been done. The deployments are automated and the work has been done for you already. This is great is you're a developer and you don't have time to worry about all of the backend nonsense, you need an infrastructure and you need to start on your application/web frontend/whatever right now. Regardless of where you're hosting it though, losing access to the MS library is going to be a heavy blow.

toyg 13y ago

Same here. Today, I can build a test image with version X of software Y in preparation for an engagement, then archive the image; 18 months later, when customers come back with an issue, I can fire up that image and figure out fairly quickly what "fabulous customization" they've done that broke my setup. In the cloud, this exercise would likely cost me $$$ every month, since I'd have to keep around hundreds of GB of virtual volumes. Clearly I have to rethink my workflow, or I could go back to piracy, like I used to when I was a penniless minion. Microsoft: finding more ways to be hated and irrelevant since 2003.

incision 13y ago
>In the cloud, this exercise would likely cost me $$$ every month, since I'd have to keep around hundreds of GB of virtual volumes. Personally, I'd rather pay some cloud provider a few dozen dollars per month to hang on to a bunch of volumes and snapshots that I can access/redeploy trivially from anywhere than maintain all the same in my home.
- toyg 13y ago
  I guess I'm special: most of my engagements drop me on-site without real connectivity (even 3g is often poor). But yeah, I see your point. As a company, we're a bit behind on the whole AWS thing, mostly because of fear of ungodly bills at the end of the month. Funnily enough, I'm the only one here trying to actually use it.
- ckozlowski 13y ago
  I'm tempted to go this route in the future instead of the home ESXi server I run. I realize this is probably a bit unique compared to most, but a lot of what I do in my instance is build private clouds for customers. AWS is great, but their infrastructure is already built; its the end stage at which most of the heavy lifting has already been done. The deployments are automated and the work has been done for you already. This is great is you're a developer and you don't have time to worry about all of the backend nonsense, you need an infrastructure and you need to start on your application/web frontend/whatever right now. Regardless of where you're hosting it though, losing access to the MS library is going to be a heavy blow.