Microsoft Will Squeeze Datacenters On Price of Windows Server 274
Nerval's Lobster writes "Microsoft plans to raise the price of the Datacenter edition of the upcoming R2 release of Windows Server 2012 by 28 percent, adding to what analysts call a record number of price increases for enterprise software products from Redmond. According to licensing data sheets available for download from the Windows Server 2012 R2 Website (PDF), the price of a single license of Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter will be $6,155, compared to $4,809 today—plus the cost of a Client Access Licenses for every user or device connecting to the server. News of the increase was posted yesterday by datacenter virtualization and security specialist Aidan Finn, a six-time Microsoft MVP who works for Dublin-based value added reseller MicroWarehouse Ltd. and has done work for clients including Amdahl, Fujitsu and Barclays. The increase caps off a year filled with a record number of price increases for Microsoft enterprise software, according to a Tweet yesterday from Microsoft software licensing analyst Paul DeGroot of Pica Communications."
I'm not that surprised. (Score:5, Informative)
Datacentre allows unlimited virtualization and consolidation ratios are climbing.
We run around 300 Windows VMs on 16 CPUs, that was a major saving over Windows Server Enterprise Licenses.
Still, the pain.
Jason.
Re:I'm not that surprised. (Score:3, Informative)
How much would that cost from RedHat?
Redhat don't sell Windows licenses last time I checked.
We get Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server for about $1,000 per year.
My licensing costs (Score:5, Informative)
CentOS 6 - $0.00
Apache - $0.00
MariaDB - $0.00
PHP - $0.00
GNU C++ - $0.00
TOTAL -- $0.00
Plus number of hours spent auditing licensing: ZERO
Now let's look at my development tools:XCode, SSH, Firefox, Chrome, VIM, and the command line. For an additional zero dollars.
But the best bit is that even if MS said, "Dude you are so wonderful that we will now give you an unlimited license to every product we have completely for free for life." I wouldn't even crack the film wrap on the packaging. It is not out of some religious hatred of MS but that the products I use match my needs perfectly. So for me at least to switch back to MS would be to make my products and productivity worse.
Re:I'm not that surprised. (Score:5, Informative)
What is the gain for this pain? From a business standpoint, I would want to know what R2 delivers that would necessitate a price increase. If there isn't much then this makes it hard sell for businesses: "We get to pay more for no reason!"
A number of important improvements to Hyper-V allowing higher VM density and (if you run 2012R2 guests) improved performance because of more direct access to hardware. Also, Hyper-V replica
Storage Spaces with tiered storage (what is usually only available with SANs). You can fit a server with regular disks, fast disks and/or SSDs and set up tiered storage spaces, e.g. with parity (think ZFS). Server 2012R2 will then move "hot blocks" to faster disks and move them back to slower disks when they are not accessed as often anymore, letting other hot blocks utilize the faster tier.
A number of manageability improvements, among those PowerShell with Desired State Configuration (think puppet/chef on steroids for what is not already covered by group policies).
There's more. You can read some of it here: http://www.zdnet.com/windows-server-2012-r2-a-first-look-7000017675/ [zdnet.com]
Whether it is value enough to justify the price increase is probably subjective. However, it could steal away some SAN business as you now basically can set it up to provide the same features as (at least) entry level SANs. Also the higher VM density could be worth money.
Re:Smaller percentage increase than Linux. (Score:4, Informative)
Let me see... Linux is now out for 22 years... zero times 2 to the 22nd power is... still zero!
Re:Fine with me (Score:4, Informative)
Say you have some vertical market application that only runs on Windows Server.
Yes you as a Linux purist would balk at the idea, but most enterprises have plenty of these apps that some manager spent a ton of money on that they pay you to keep running.
That said - I've got a bunch of Windows servers in my enterprise - they don't have any uptime issues. The most recent outage was causes by the data center UPS exploding (which forced all the circuits onto the remaining two and they shut down - yeah its a nasty wiring/design issue).