@CCWTech said in Can you run a Windows desktop OS as a server to run AVImark Veterinary Software?:

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Very impressive, so few people are actually looking to research and learn, just to argue. Kudos to him.

@scottalanmiller Weird I haven't see that, that is a new one for me.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-weve-open-sourced-this-tool-we-used-to-hunt-for-code-by-solarwinds-hackers/

There you go
http://nitindupare.blogspot.com/2012/08/uninstall-kms-host.html

@dbeato said in VM Windows 10 Pro Licensing On Hyper-V:

@scottalanmiller said in VM Windows 10 Pro Licensing On Hyper-V:

@dbeato said in VM Windows 10 Pro Licensing On Hyper-V:

@scottalanmiller said in VM Windows 10 Pro Licensing On Hyper-V:

@NashBrydges said in VM Windows 10 Pro Licensing On Hyper-V:

There is no AD of any kind.

This doesn't play in. AD doesn't have any licensing. It is included in Windows Server and has no licenses or requirements of its own. If you can use server, you can use it, if you can't, you can't.

Microsoft Active Directory does have licensing.

What do you mean? There's no case where it gets licensed. You license Windows Server and AD is part of it, there's no license for AD itself. Any situation where you'd use AD you already have to have Windows Server license, and nothing extra is ever needed.

Well yeah, in order to use Microsoft Active Directory you still need a Windows Server which yes has to have a CAL (Per user or per device) for using same for SQL, RDS, Sharepoint and Exchange (onprem). So you were right 🙂

Yeah, you can't use AD without a license, but there's no license for AD 🙂

@DustinB3403 said in Office 365 Suite - User Licensing T&C:

And what I specifically was hoping someone had a link for was to MS's license or T&C saying that "no you can't share an account for multiple people".

Obviously this doesn't exists since the way the software is procured is per user.

Right, they won't repeat it because they have it in writing already. But you can always show that it is 1) assigned to a named user 2) at the time of procurement you have to agree to a single human.

That's better than any T&C link.

@Pete-S said in Windows Server licensing for HA?:

If you have two servers and run HA, does that mean that you have to license Windows Server standard for the maximum number of VMs running when you have a failure?

So for example,
Server A: 16 cores, runs 6 VMs normally
Server B: 16 cores, runs 6 VMs normally

So each server has to be licensed for all 12 VMs running on 16 cores - so 6 x Windows Server Standard licenses for each server, total of 12 licenses?

But if you didn't run HA, you would only license each server for 6 VMs, with 3 x Windows Server Standard, a total of 6 licenses?

Is this correct?

Yup.

If you're running a HA setup of Server Standard, all physical servers must be licensed for all Windows Server VMs that can run on them. This means each physical server in your HA cluster must be licensed for 12 Windows Server VMs.

So yes, you are correct in that to license 12 Windows Server VMs on both of your physical servers, you'll need 6x Windows Server Standard licenses for each server, 12 "licenses" total as you said.

I won't have any Win 7 systems by that time. At least that is the goal. I was thinking it was Jan 20, 2020. Guess I just confabulated that based on the year being 2020. Still have about 40 systems to issue to replace them.

@scottalanmiller said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:

@flaxking said in Microsoft Office - Licensing Questions For 3 Scenarios:

I think you must be missing what's going on here. This removes the requirement to integrate more directly with MS Office, instead relying on a separate library that is provided standalone from Office and thus allows saving to Excel. We've had zero issues with using this library, which is actually pretty uncommon for us.

The issue is flexibility. Using third party libraries, you can integrate with Excel or with anything else. Using the Office libraries, every user, in ever system, is bound by the limitations of the most problematic. It makes deployments more costly, and more complex.

That's true, it's the kind of self perpetuating lock-in that has served Microsoft so well. People use Excel, and they ask for saving to Excel spreadsheet, so we create the integration specially to allow Excel and not include ODF, then we help keep the industry locked into using Excel because that's all we support unless you want to just save to CSV.

As for the cost and complexity of deployments... that could be true, except that the installation of our main software is already so complex and costly that dealing with potentially installing this library is the easiest part. I think we probably only have one other developer who would be able to figure out how to install it. I've never heard of any client's IT that have been able to figure out how to install it (just calls from those who have tried), client services has to do literally every install.

@scottalanmiller
This may also help:
https://blogs.partner.microsoft.com/mpn/myth-busting-software-asset-management-and-compliance-audits/?ln=en-us
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/learn-more/compliance-verification-faq

Things like:

Microsoft SAM programs are voluntary services... A compliance audit is a mandatory review of a company’s use of Microsoft’s products and services...
These compliance verifications are initiated across less than 5% of Microsoft’s licensing customers worldwide

But ignoring things like:

We believe that SAM can be a strategic advantage for all our customers

@pmoncho said in The Hidden Cost of Licensing Windows Server - Activation:

@scottalanmiller said in The Hidden Cost of Licensing Windows Server - Activation:

Just looking at this with a customer that just put in a new Windows 2019 server. The machine was purchased with a volume license agreement for Server 2019 Standard. Everything should be super easy, in theory. Problem is, license key from the volume license center doesn't work. We spend a bit of time trying to get this to apply, but no luck.

I have run into a similar situation this morning and not being able activate the VLSC liscense.

Before I decided to call MS and getting frustrated, I was able to activate from an elevated command line.
cscript c:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs /ipk <product key>

Throwing this out here in case someone comes along this post at a later time.

I've heard that that often works. We had tried that in our case and it had failed.

@dbeato said in Windows 10 IOT Enterprise:

@dafyre said in Windows 10 IOT Enterprise:

@Dashrender said in Windows 10 IOT Enterprise:

Though - now that I think about it - does IOT require activation? I thought it was free?

If there is an enterprise version of IOT - I have no clue

In my reading, Windows 10 IOT will attempt to activate (nor will it complain) if you never connect the device to the internet. Of course, once you connect it, it will try to activate.

Interesting, I didn't understand this part

By default, KMS clients on your Windows IoT Enterprise with no additional configuration needed.

It will act like a regular desktop and activate against your KMS server if you hook it up to the network.

@scottalanmiller said in REDIS changes its open-source license again:

Looks like it is only some modules...

https://redis.io/modules

This is all the previous change was also.

@DustinB3403 said in Backup Options - Licensing Costs - Storage Targets:

@dafyre said in Backup Options - Licensing Costs - Storage Targets:

When we start looking, we'll start with the usual culprits like Veeam. ShadowProtect comes highly recommended to me by several folks (Including the guy who just built the ReadyNAS)... We'd hit the other major players as well.

So cost is going to bite you in the ass, since you said there were concerns about licensing. But they are all valid options.

@dafyre said in Backup Options - Licensing Costs - Storage Targets:

Good Backup Compression / Deduplication is a must. We have ~30TB of systems and data.

You can perform the compression on your storage layer or use dedup or both. This may affect the overall performance though.

@dafyre said in Backup Options - Licensing Costs - Storage Targets:

We don't care if it's full install, agent based, or Hypervisor based. It just needs to work.

Based on this I would think Agent based would be a decent option. But didn't you say you have something along the lines of 300 VMs? Might become tedious.

Yeah, we'd likely do the dedupe at the Storage layer. Our Current Nimble devices do this relatively well with our live data. Something like 1.3 or 1.4 to 1 compression is what i remember. It may be more or less.

If we went Agent based, we can push the agents via PDQ Deploy for Windows and a shell script or something for Linux. (Most of our Production Linux systems are SLES 12)... If reboots are required, systems can be rebooted during our patch window... (5-7am every day).

@PhlipElder said in Windows Server Upgrade - MS Retail, Open, Open Value or Open Value Subscription:

@pmoncho said in Windows Server Upgrade - MS Retail, Open, Open Value or Open Value Subscription:

Is there anyone out there using OV non-company wide with spread payments?

If so, I am trying to find out if I should purchase all licenses that I think I MAY need upfront?

If I can add to my license (additional CAL's or Server License), how is it calculated if it is during middle of the license year?

All of our clients, and us too, run Open Value Agreement with the spread payment option. Company-wide was too restrictive so we never did go with it.

Here are the numbers I get using MS License Advisor (for part numbers) with pcm.com pricing.
Does that look roughly correct?

c26878e2-7acb-4be3-ac54-890c7cc7f7b1-image.png

@DustinB3403 said in Server license or VDI (or possibly desktop with Desktop Windows OS)?:

@pchiodo said in Server license or VDI (or possibly desktop with Desktop Windows OS)?:

Probably do not need a server license. Most of these type of apps can be run in Client/Server mode on a desktop so I think you would be fine. Bigger question is how many people are going to use the app? Just one? then a desktop or a VDI would be fine. If there is more than 5 accessing then I would move to a 3 tier with a VM using Windows Server.

The number of users is actually irrelevant. What matters is the number of concurrent connections and the type of content being hosted.

This would fall outside of what MS has allowed in the Desktop licensing.

Depends on the mode... number via SMB, doesn't matter. Number by RDP matters.

@dbeato said in Using Windows 10 Public ISO with VLSC MAK:

Sot it just activated it right?

Yup.

@DustinB3403 said in With ESXi Licensing what happens if I let it lapse:

Microsoft started pulling Security patches off of their servers after your contract expires but the platform is still supported.

Microsoft no longer provides patches for XP Server 2003 unless you pay them a lot of extra money. It's basically a license with security updates for a fixed interval that can be extended for a ton of money...

@StorageNinja said in MongoDB Major Change to Licensing:

@scottalanmiller said in MongoDB Major Change to Licensing:

if you are a SaaS vendor looking at building software that uses MongoDB somewhere, you'd better get a lawyer looking over this license and how it applies to you.

This is becoming a bigger issue as the biggest SaaS vendors hide behind this clause more and more with incredibly proprietary forks. They offer very little to no actual core development or contribution and it goes against the previous method of GPL code getting funding.

It annoys me, as the legal headaches of contributing internal only use code back will block some companies from using OSS, but I see it both ways.

The startups who are doing a lot of the core housekeeping of NOSQL platforms are learning they can't find a business model. This is getting messier and messier.

Partially because there are just too any vendors involved.

What's amazing, though, is that a move like this took a customer who was very into MongoDB and using it in projects and was literally working with MongoDB's own hosted product and now looking to avoid it like the plague.

So at least in this one case, they are likely losing hosted product from this. And gaining nothing. I imagine a lot of customers going through this same process.