Hyper-V replication licensing
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@scottalanmiller said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@DustinB3403 said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@JaredBusch said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@DustinB3403 said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
My statement with needing 2 licenses is one license per hardware server. Which allows you 4 VM's total (or as desired) 2 VM's with the option to fail over outside of a Disaster event.
I honestly don't see how it could be misunderstood.
You are the one misunderstanding or maybe just conflating things.. @Mike-Davis does not want fail over outside of DR. So there is no point, reason, or legal need for a second Windows Server license.
Maybe I am not understanding the question at hand, but at post 6 @Mike-Davis mentions he has a client who "only needs two servers"
This to me (assuming physical) as is followed up in the same post would give them the licenses they need for 2 hypervisors (4 VM's or 2 VM's and fail over). Again assuming these are Standard licenses.
He needs two licenses if physical, only one if virtual.
And if they have two hosts (2 clustered Hyper-V servers) the client is better suited with having the Two Server Standard licenses up front. Rather than risk litigation with Microsoft about what is "Disaster recovery"
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@DustinB3403 said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@JaredBusch said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@DustinB3403 said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@JaredBusch said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@DustinB3403 said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
My statement with needing 2 licenses is one license per hardware server. Which allows you 4 VM's total (or as desired) 2 VM's with the option to fail over outside of a Disaster event.
I honestly don't see how it could be misunderstood.
You are the one misunderstanding or maybe just conflating things.. @Mike-Davis does not want fail over outside of DR. So there is no point, reason, or legal need for a second Windows Server license.
Maybe I am not understanding the question at hand, but at post 6 @Mike-Davis mentions he has a client who "only needs two servers"
That same post is where he stated that they will not be switching back and forth.
In what world does a server crash and burn, the systems are manually migrated, and when the original system is backup and running for backup purposes not get used?
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.
In most situations where you are buying two servers and only using the second for replication, you are accepting that once you failover, you have to wait 90 days before failing it back to the repaired server. That is the design of the setup.
If they want something else, then this is not the right setup.
But it is specifically what was asked.
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@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: $1400That's an additional $700 with the sole benefit being able to have a second device die and to fail back to the first (or a third) one immediately. The key being immediately. $700 is a HUGE waste of money, in nearly all cases, for that.
If you fail once, you are rare enough. Most shops never experience the first failover scenario. The second one is, almost, unheard of. It's ridiculously rare. Really, really, rare.
In the even that you are hit with the second scenario, an extra Windows license is... $700 and takes, what, 30 minutes to buy, tops? So you either wait for the second server to get repaired (this might take only a few minutes or a few hours or a day or two tops) or you spend $700 to mitigate that at the time and you are only down for thirty minutes AND you can be doing all the prep for the failover WHILE the license is being purchased. You just can't technically fire up the VM until the purchase goes through. Extra downtime approaches zero.
The extra license is not cheap and mitigates essentially zero risk.
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@DustinB3403 said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@scottalanmiller said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@DustinB3403 said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@JaredBusch said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@DustinB3403 said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
My statement with needing 2 licenses is one license per hardware server. Which allows you 4 VM's total (or as desired) 2 VM's with the option to fail over outside of a Disaster event.
I honestly don't see how it could be misunderstood.
You are the one misunderstanding or maybe just conflating things.. @Mike-Davis does not want fail over outside of DR. So there is no point, reason, or legal need for a second Windows Server license.
Maybe I am not understanding the question at hand, but at post 6 @Mike-Davis mentions he has a client who "only needs two servers"
This to me (assuming physical) as is followed up in the same post would give them the licenses they need for 2 hypervisors (4 VM's or 2 VM's and fail over). Again assuming these are Standard licenses.
He needs two licenses if physical, only one if virtual.
And if they have two hosts (2 clustered Hyper-V servers) the client is better suited with having the Two Server Standard licenses up front. Rather than risk litigation with Microsoft about what is "Disaster recovery"
What risk? You are adding in something that is not here.
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@DustinB3403 said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@scottalanmiller said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@DustinB3403 said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@JaredBusch said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@DustinB3403 said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
My statement with needing 2 licenses is one license per hardware server. Which allows you 4 VM's total (or as desired) 2 VM's with the option to fail over outside of a Disaster event.
I honestly don't see how it could be misunderstood.
You are the one misunderstanding or maybe just conflating things.. @Mike-Davis does not want fail over outside of DR. So there is no point, reason, or legal need for a second Windows Server license.
Maybe I am not understanding the question at hand, but at post 6 @Mike-Davis mentions he has a client who "only needs two servers"
This to me (assuming physical) as is followed up in the same post would give them the licenses they need for 2 hypervisors (4 VM's or 2 VM's and fail over). Again assuming these are Standard licenses.
He needs two licenses if physical, only one if virtual.
Yes, I get this. But those VM's can't run on separate hardware. Nor can they be rotated back to repaired hardware until that 90 day window.
Why would he rotate them back though? From what he said the "backup" system would become "production" and the repaired "production" system would become "backup".
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@DustinB3403 said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@scottalanmiller said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@DustinB3403 said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@JaredBusch said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
@DustinB3403 said in Hyper-V replication licensing:
My statement with needing 2 licenses is one license per hardware server. Which allows you 4 VM's total (or as desired) 2 VM's with the option to fail over outside of a Disaster event.
I honestly don't see how it could be misunderstood.
You are the one misunderstanding or maybe just conflating things.. @Mike-Davis does not want fail over outside of DR. So there is no point, reason, or legal need for a second Windows Server license.
Maybe I am not understanding the question at hand, but at post 6 @Mike-Davis mentions he has a client who "only needs two servers"
This to me (assuming physical) as is followed up in the same post would give them the licenses they need for 2 hypervisors (4 VM's or 2 VM's and fail over). Again assuming these are Standard licenses.
He needs two licenses if physical, only one if virtual.
Yes, I get this. But those VM's can't run on separate hardware. Nor can they be rotated back to repaired hardware until that 90 day window.
But that's really not important.
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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.
