Hyper-V replication licensing
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@DustinB3403 said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
Rather than risk litigation with Microsoft about what is "Disaster recovery"
But 1) there is essentially no risk of that situation coming up and 2) you just buy the license when needed rather than spending the money ahead of time.
What's the risk?
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here common SMB IT person mistake - Not counting the days since host failure, rotate VM's back to original host for "Server maintenance"
Opps you're out of compliance, MS now has something to audit and fine you for.
Well done.
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@DustinB3403 said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
here common SMB IT person mistake - Not counting the days since host failure, rotate VM's back to original host for "Server maintenance"
Opps you're out of compliance, MS now has something to audit and fine you for.
Well done.
So hire competent people. Have HR look into this. If you have people with that level of problem, this is literally the least of your concerns. They will be doing so many reckless things that you would never worry about this one. Not only is the situation almost never going to come up, but you'd have to be audited during that tiny window, and it's an accident (which MS is pretty lenient about anyway) and does not constitute grand theft even if they took you to court, making it small claims court and almost certainly a win for the company.
So while you point out a real risk, it is...
- Not a risk of this scenario but of a different one involving assuming bad hiring and IT management practices, so address it there IF it exists at this shop.
- Applying the assumed common mistakes of others to these people. There is no reason to do that, if we did that we'd have to assume all kinds of mistakes. Imagine if your car insurance company raised your rates because someone across town tended to have accidents. That's what this is like.
- A trivial scenario that even if the IT people are totally idiots in this way, or careless, is almost never going to happen.
- Can be rectified ahead of an audit in minutes.
- Not really a financial risk even if it came to that, unless there were other licensing problems adding to it already.
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@DustinB3403 said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
here common SMB IT person mistake - Not counting the days since host failure, rotate VM's back to original host for "Server maintenance"
You can also fix this by outsourcing, of course. Any competent IT department knows this immediately and this one is obviously outsourcing to us.
So in this example, it is people like Mike and me that you are assuming will make this mistake.
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@scottalanmiller Scott you always mention having HR hire competent people, yet you do understand that a lot of places are tiny, and have no clue.
How many people actually read an entire acceptable use policy etc.
Don't use the crap excuse of "Have HR hire competent people" when often HR doesn't have the slighted clue about what IT involves.
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@DustinB3403 said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@scottalanmiller Scott you always mention having HR hire competent people, yet you do understand that a lot of places are tiny, and have no clue.
How many people actually read an entire acceptable use policy etc.
Don't use the crap excuse of "Have HR hire competent people" when often doesn't have the slighted clue about what IT involves.
I'm not understanding your argument. SMBs don't hire good people in any position so why should we expect them to hire good people?
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@coliver said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@DustinB3403 said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@scottalanmiller Scott you always mention having HR hire competent people, yet you do understand that a lot of places are tiny, and have no clue.
How many people actually read an entire acceptable use policy etc.
Don't use the crap excuse of "Have HR hire competent people" when often doesn't have the slighted clue about what IT involves.
I'm not understanding your argument. SMBs don't hire good people in any position so why should we expect them to hire good people?
That is my point, SMB's hire multi-hatted people to fill several roles. Hardly a "good" person in most cases to think of use scenario's like this.
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@DustinB3403 said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@coliver said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@DustinB3403 said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@scottalanmiller Scott you always mention having HR hire competent people, yet you do understand that a lot of places are tiny, and have no clue.
How many people actually read an entire acceptable use policy etc.
Don't use the crap excuse of "Have HR hire competent people" when often doesn't have the slighted clue about what IT involves.
I'm not understanding your argument. SMBs don't hire good people in any position so why should we expect them to hire good people?
That is my point, SMB's hire multi-hatted people to fill several roles. Hardly a "good" person in most cases to think of use scenario's like this.
So because those people are bad at their job/s we can't expect them to do their job?
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@scottalanmiller argument here is that if they don't what they are doing to outsource it, and I don't disagree. Yet many businesses refuse to, and do it them selves.
Bringing stupid issues as this up.
Whatever I'm done with ML for today.
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@DustinB3403 said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@scottalanmiller Scott you always mention having HR hire competent people, yet you do understand that a lot of places are tiny, and have no clue.
I understand this well, but we can't assume that businesses are stupid, or don't care, when making recommendations. Because you either get into pointless picking and choosing (why assume this one, incredibly unlikely mistake and not millions of more obvious ones, none of which are fully within the context of the question at hand) or you go down the slippery slope of assuming that they are totally incompetent which will always end in the assumption that the business will fail and that they should not spend a penny but just give up now.
Unless you are going to assume the obvious result of the base assumption, you can't use that kind of logic. If you know the IT person specifically and know that this is an exact risk that that person is very, very prone to, that's more or less fine. That's dealing with a specific failing. But just assuming that all small businesses are stupid or incapable and that it will result in random, significant failures then we obvious assume total failure as a final result.
And mathematically, by far more SMBs do fail, so this is a reasonable assumption. But we can never give advice based on that assumption. Does that make sense? Sure, most businesses fail, but we must give advice assuming that this one will not and that it operates on logic and good practices most of the time.
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@DustinB3403 said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
Don't use the crap excuse of "Have HR hire competent people" when often HR doesn't have the slighted clue about what IT involves.
THey don't need to. Not at all. Good hiring doesn't require that. It's thinking that it does is where HR departments get in trouble, which is an HR failing that management needs to fix.
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@DustinB3403 said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@scottalanmiller argument here is that if they don't what they are doing to outsource it, and I don't disagree. Yet many businesses refuse to, and do it them selves.
But that is not our problem and we should not be assuming those mistakes on their behalf and wasting their money randomly because we assume that they will make an imagined mistake.
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@DustinB3403 said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
Bringing stupid issues as this up.
You brought it up and didn't explain why you were recommending doing something mathematically risky. I didn't bring it up at all. Nor did @JaredBusch we only pointed out that buying an extra license was totally unnecessary and would just be a waste of money.
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@scottalanmiller said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
Nothing wrong with tape on its own. But I would explain to them that this is a mismatch of needs. They clearly dont' see themselves as a viable business, but as a hobby (no virtualization.) If they don't virtualize, they can't reasonably say that they think this is a real business, they are SO far below the home line it isn't even discussable. No grey area at all, this is a hobby and a joke to their owners. Make that absolutely clear.
Scott your insulting hobbyists. Most of the OS instances in my house are virtual. My home datacenter looks down on their business practices.
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@John-Nicholson said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@scottalanmiller said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
Nothing wrong with tape on its own. But I would explain to them that this is a mismatch of needs. They clearly dont' see themselves as a viable business, but as a hobby (no virtualization.) If they don't virtualize, they can't reasonably say that they think this is a real business, they are SO far below the home line it isn't even discussable. No grey area at all, this is a hobby and a joke to their owners. Make that absolutely clear.
Scott your insulting hobbyists. Most of the OS instances in my house are virtual. My home datacenter looks down on their business practices.
That's why I said, only low end hobbyists. Any serious hobbyist would obviously be virtual, and backed up.
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I just showed up to say you are all wrong
They should buy Software Assurance which will let them migrate that license back and forth whenever they want at a lower cost than buying a full stand alone license.
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@scottalanmiller said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@DustinB3403 said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
If the original backup host fails in 90 days, the client is then on the hook to Microsoft. It's far cheaper to purchase a second standard license then to worry about it.
Not in 99.999% of cases. Remember you are talking about a double failure, not a single failure. So let's run the numbers assuming a single license is $700.
For 90 Day Failover Window Licensing Cost: $700
For Sub 90 Day Double Failover Licensing Cost: $1400The drug you are looking for is failing over to reduce maintenance window times for host/hypervisor patching every patch Tuesday (assuming Hyper-V).
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@John-Nicholson said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
I just showed up to say you are all wrong
They should buy Software Assurance which will let them migrate that license back and forth whenever they want at a lower cost than buying a full stand alone license.
Yup, way better than a second license. But easily still not worth it based on this risk alone. Even if the business was making a million an hour (which would make them a Fortune 100) it's only worth a few hundred bucks to mitigate this risk alone. SA might be worth it for lots of other reasons, I'm an SA fan generally, it would have to be really cheap to make sense here just from the ability to fall back really quickly. But with the other benefits, is easily the way to go.
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@John-Nicholson said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@scottalanmiller said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@DustinB3403 said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
If the original backup host fails in 90 days, the client is then on the hook to Microsoft. It's far cheaper to purchase a second standard license then to worry about it.
Not in 99.999% of cases. Remember you are talking about a double failure, not a single failure. So let's run the numbers assuming a single license is $700.
For 90 Day Failover Window Licensing Cost: $700
For Sub 90 Day Double Failover Licensing Cost: $1400The drug you are looking for is failing over to reduce maintenance window times for host/hypervisor patching every patch Tuesday (assuming Hyper-V).
Yes, very true. If there is a need for scheduled downtime, that would be very different. That would easily justify the cost, but few SMBs are hit by that. More than are hit with the 90 day problem, but still pretty few. Since you need scheduled downtime for the OS anyway that can't be avoided through any means in these scenarios, it's can't be a significant deal.
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@JaredBusch said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@Mike-Davis Hyper-V replication works fine but there is no automated power on or failure detection. That requires you setup a cluster and use SCCM I believe.
I use basic replication at a number of locations and it works great.
If you are using replication for DR, then yes you need the second windows license. Because the potential for migration is always there.
If you are failing over manually. Then you can get away with one server.
But I have to ask, if you are dropping a few grand for the hardware, why would you not spend the extra on the second License and have HA setup?
