Windows Server 2012 R2: how the Datacenter edition could change SMBs

Steve Cassidy Read more March 7, 2014

Now that Windows Server 2012 R2 is out there, I’m getting to grips with a small surge – not yet a tidal wave – of questions.

Windows Server 2012 R2: how the Datacenter edition could change SMBs

Quite a few people agree with my assessment that this is the jump-in release for businesses that have been sitting back and waiting throughout the recession. We’re now at the stage where jumping in has begun, although judging from these emails, it’s still mostly about putting some test boxes together and going for a free trial download.

How cool is it that? Given a storm-free internet and a few hours, you can run up a trial version of the latest release and then sit in front of it for a full 180 days before you need to worry about buying a licence – certainly a step forwards from the old days. However, it’s also advance warning of a new difficulty and – just for a change – it isn’t a technical issue.

Given a storm-free internet and a few hours, you can run up a trial version of the latest release and then sit in front of it for a full 180 days

Microsoft was clearly alarmed by all the fuss kicked up by VMware’s customers over sudden changes to licensing rules introduced in an otherwise relatively minor upgrade: hence the approach to licensing Server 2012 R2 is very different (although poorly explained).

I don’t mean to get all snooty and writer-ish about this (I’d hate you to think that to Cassidy everything is poorly explained unless illuminated by the blazing light of his own intellect). Actually, I was most impressed by the explanation that Redmond’s techies gave me of what their new toy could do.

The good vibes broke down only once our discussion arrived at what could be done with the various versions of Server 2012, almost all of which vary only in licence keys rather than in the delivered code. Incidentally, there’s a lot of confusion over the DVD ISO labels, arising from exactly this same problem. Yes, it is the same ISO image that you download for Server Standard and Storage Server: only their licence key sets them apart.

Full version, full price

You’ll notice that the 180-day trial is of the Datacenter edition, and this is no accident. Datacenter is the full-fat, all-options build, and you wouldn’t want to miss out on any features during the course of a trial. Of course, Microsoft would like to steer you towards buying Datacenter, the most expensive version, by making it a little difficult to figure out which features are cut out from the lesser releases.

You can’t get any more roles or features in Windows Server 2012 R2 than those included or enabled by a Datacenter licence key. The price gap is pretty impressive, though: at the time of writing, Dabs lists a plain Essentials 64-bit server licence at £292, then neatly adds an extra digit for the equivalent, no-added-users Datacenter licence, at £2,925.

And my response to such prices, and to your questions, may shock you, because I believe that smaller businesses should plump for Datacenter.

Okay, take a few minutes to reel in shock (Steve Cassidy in shopaholic horror!). Three thousand pounds retail? That’s a huge outlay for a server OS.

I acknowledge this, especially in an industry that’s been walking away from high upfront costs for the last half-decade as an article of faith (and customer sympathy).

I also want to be sure you understand I’m not advising that everybody jump in with the big cheques. But if you like the idea of the 180-day trial, then consider how good it would be to get a deal where you could just keep blatting out server VMs ad infinitum.
No constraints, just keep spawning them until you run out of disk – but remember that you can just add more disk, courtesy of iSCSI at the cost of a basic NAS box.

Consider how good it would be to get a deal where you could just keep blatting out server VMs ad infinitum

“Come off it, Steve,” I hear you say, “this is what you get from hanging around with hyper-rich corporate buyers all the time. Remember us little guys who don’t get open licensing contracts and infinite yearly budgets.” And I’m forced to retort, “that’s exactly what Datacenter edition gives you!”

Read the licence carefully and you’ll see that you can have up to two sockets per licence, and that said licence permits you to make and run as many VM guest server instances as you want. Paradoxically, it’s in the big data centre where the various GUI-less and even free editions (such as Hyper-V Server) have both a place and a following, where servers are counted by the thousands.

This is a case where the language is leading everyone astray – this deal sounds like it’s the same as VMware’s larger offering, where you can stick up a VM based on any OS, get it licensed, and off you go.

The difference is that while VMware will run almost any server OS, and has made it something of a speciality to collect the ghosts of previous physical servers, the main strength of Hyper-V (and therefore Datacenter) is just the opposite – it’s superb for putting up new, unsullied guest VMs, each of which is simply a virtual version of the main Datacenter installation, and all of which are covered by the one Datacenter licence.

Radically different

Let’s say that in a mid-sized company it would be safer and more comfortable to push out three or four test VM servers for each live one you rely upon, with the free option to flip between these disk images by firing up and shutting down machines in Hyper-V Manager.

I discussed this with one client as perhaps the easiest route to updating a middle-aged Remote Desktop server, allowing for several different mixes of applications for a small group of users.

By using Datacenter he can build four VMs just for Remote Desktop, with shared drives for profile and application data, all within a single box. When he wants to try mixing together previously poorly behaved apps, it’s a few clicks to clone an existing (shut down!) VM, try the installs, and if they go badly, throw it away…

This is a radically different way of thinking about your licensed server. It opens up the IT world of the mega-corporation and puts it right there in front of you: and that’s even before we consider the possibilities for spawning multiple, fully licensed VMs into the Azure cloud.