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Maybe one of you are an expert in this area. I'm in a battle with my customer's IT department. I need to set up a couple of VMs to run Windows 7. Of course, you cannot directly buy Windows 7 any more. There are OEM licenses out the wahzoo, but you have to put those on new hardware. So, IT won't allow me to use their OEM in the VMs.
First question - does a virtual machine constitute "new hardware"? I would argue yes, but then I'm doing battle with IT.
Second, Windows 8 downgrade rights - what I've read is that you ONLY have downgrade rights if you have a Windows 8 oem license. Anyone know?
Thanks for any pointers
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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If you have MSDN, you have a bunch of win7 keys for test use including VMs. In theory you should be able to use them. I can't, I believe the problem is that Corporate ITs audit tool can't tell the difference between a VM using an MSDN key and one created using a key that increments the cost of their MS site license. 
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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OEM on a VM is a no go. VL and SA allow downgrading as does OEM (limited), but I cannot say about retail.
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tgrt - VL? SA? wtf?
English or some other foreign language pls. 
And wtf is the issue with MS selling 1 license for 1 use? Oh $hiut, I made it too simple. God, I am back working for DEC
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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VL = volume licensing
SA = who knows? South Africa? Googling turns up another interesting possibility though.
And we've been tearing out our hair at the complexity of MS's licensing too.
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VL = volume licensing (open value & enterprise)
SA = software assurance
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SA- software assurance is a marketing thing, and all I want to know is how to play fair. In going back and forth with IT, I declare FI (elaphanting it). MS is making this too damn hard and frustrating. I suspect that the s/w I want to run will do just fine on Win8. I have a 90 day trial to test.
The sad thing is - and this is meant for all you MS lurkers - you're making it too hard to worry about your license. And I could care bloody less for your legal rules. All I want to do is pay you some $$ for Windows 7 so I can run it on a VM. Let's say 10 VMs. I'll pay you 10 fees, yes? No, nothing I find on your website makes it that simple.
rant over.
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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Sorry, I fear their bureaucracy has started to confuse even them. We've got an annual battle (at least, sometimes it's every few months) to try and prove to MS that we're actually not pirating their stuff or using more server lics than we've got. It's not so much the actual fees that's the issue - that's budgeted for and we've always paid properly. It's the inordinate amount of paperwork we need to wade through in order to prove that we've actually paid what we owe. It's getting to a point where we're seriously thinking of getting away from all things MS, unfortunately we simply cannot get away from the Desktop due to some of our main business programs only available on Win. But definitely the server lics are killing any chance that MS will ever again make it's presence felt in our server room.
And then just to throw salt on our exposed whip-marks we're battling with VMWare on their Horizon View server. They can't actually tell us how their licensing works. Apparently it's something to do with cores and ram use, but they cannot give us any figures. How's that for you: "We'll tell you later how much you should have paid ... probably in the court case when we finally made up our mind and decided that you've paid too little".
This makes me remember something I read in Terry Pratchet's Good Omens: "Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: "Learn, guys..."" (Crowley being a demon from hell).
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 laughing... MS, you so silly.
Years ago, I worked at a telecom that made use of a Telco switch - 128 lines in, 128 lines out. Basically, we could handle 128 connections simultaneously. The original team for this product had negotiated with Oracle some licensing terms which were ridiculous. Basically, one license per connection, and shared threads were not allowed.
Then came the upgrades to 256, 1024 lines, etc. Oracle gladly took our money, until we got the new VP. When Oracle heard that we were about to implement a virtual Telco switch (effectively infinite connections), they started salivating. The VP said, no, we're not going to do this. Amazingly, Oracle refused to be reasonable... They actually wanted a real-time monitor in place to track peak usage.
We switched to MySQL
I'm going to get some demo licenses for Windows 8.1 and see if it works for my application. F it.
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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This is the horrible state of affairs...
A new client asked for some software which needs very little GUI. But they want to be able to "grow" the number of machines running it (it tests their hardware)...
A quick review of the Windows vs. Linux solutions... They opted for the Linux based SOLELY on the licensing fees. (I do have to say, the first response was "how are they going to know how many
machines we run it on?"... LOL). If they are successful, the could see having 50 of these machines running all the time.
To be honest, I am glad they made the choice they did.
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irneb wrote: And then just to throw salt on our exposed whip-marks we're battling with VMWare on their Horizon View server. They can't actually tell us how their licensing works. Apparently it's something to do with cores and ram use, but they cannot give us any figures. How's that for you: "We'll tell you later how much you should have paid ... probably in the court case when we finally made up our mind and decided that you've paid too little".
Sounds like they hired licensing drones away from IBM (ir)Rational. In completely unrelated news my employer shut down all their (ir)Rational product servers a few years ago. (And GOOD RIDDENCE to them!)
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Last time I purchased a server from Dell it took two days of back and forth trying to figure out exactly what license I needed. It finally ended up as a 3 way call with Dell and MS on the phone for an hour or so. I still ended up with the wrong thing. I could not even use the server because the licensing was incompatible with another MS server already on the network.
You were only allowed to have one of this particular type of server on a network.
I definitely prefer Linux. It has as steep learning curve but it's so much easier once you figure it out. Our dev server now runs on Linux. It takes about 3-5 hours to install from scratch but it takes less than an hour of my time. I have the distro on USB memory stick. It takes me about 5 minutes to start the installer. I come back an hour or so later and run update (a single update I might add, not update after update after update.) I come back in an hour or so and run a simple script that installs all of our software.
I come back in another hour and unzip the latest server backup, copy a copy of config files, reboot the server and everything is running.
I really don't understand why anyone would use MS server unless they just had some money burning a whole in their pocket.
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"licensing drones"
Conjures up all sorts of evil images, like the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz.
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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charlieg wrote: Thanks for any pointers
Is it a money problem - then "IT" probably isn't the place to solve it.
Is is a management problem - then "IT" won't solve it.
But if it is just a license problem and the customer shop isn't small? Then have them buy a new PC with Windows 7 and buy Win 8 (or 10?) after market. Then you use the Windows 7 in the VM and IT puts the after market on the hardware.
Or perhaps you could just use Azure (does that allow Windows 7?)
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Well, for some reason I have gone anal retentive on this situation. It just seems STUPID to have to strap another piece of hardware into the rack room. Worse, when they do maintenance, they'll forget to boot it (I know these things). For the record, the local IT group is a pretty good set of people, but they've been beaten down by the corporation.
I just have to make sure I seem to be attempting to follow the rules.
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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charlieg wrote: It just seems STUPID to have to strap another piece of hardware into the rack room.
That wasn't what I was suggesting.
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Sorry, didn't mean to imply anything at all... more ranting at the sky
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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You also need to kill the programmers family and friends because they distract him from what life is really all about: work!
That's what they teach you at the management fast-track course anyway 
My blog[ ^]
public class SanderRossel : Lazy<Person>
{
public void DoWork()
{
throw new NotSupportedException();
}
}
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Silly question aside, that first answer is actually pretty good.
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I have not worked ANYWHERE that required me, or asked me, to work 60-80 hour weeks. That is ludicrous.
However, I have had to work 60+ hour weeks, but again, that was not required, or SOP.
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Oh, look, it's 15:00, time to go home.
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