As we all know, change is the only constant in the IT industry – so we make an effort to address the subjects that matter the most to our clients and readers. Plus, it’s always interesting to reflect on the prior year and see what we were all able to overcome, embrace, and learn.
Even though we are half way through 2022 (how can that be?), we figured the opportunity to reflect still stands. Here are the top 10 most popular posts from our blog in 2021:
2022 Versions of Microsoft’s On-Premises Exchange and SharePoint Will Be Subscription Licensing
Increasingly it seems that perpetual licensing is going the way of the dodo – extinct. Then again, when it comes to Microsoft, on-premises licensing is on its way out too. So, when you pair those two trends together, you can see what’s coming down the road from Microsoft.
Rumor has it that the next versions of Exchange and SharePoint on-premises licensing, expected to drop sometime late this year, will be subscription only. Unfortunately, we have no idea yet how this will play out with server licenses and CALs. Presumably it will just be a price per-user-per month, and server licenses won’t be a set cost anymore, but that’s just conjecture at this time. This is clearly Microsoft’s newest way to get us all used to the idea of subscription – and eventually cloud – licensing models. Read more.
Why You Should Switch from Office 365 E3 to Microsoft 365 Business Premium
Welcome to the rules of Microsoft licensing, where the rules never stay the same and the names keep changing. Last year Microsoft launched/renamed their Business-level licensing and added a new level: Business Premium. So, now there are two monthly licenses you can choose from for $20 per user: Office 365 E3 or Microsoft 365 Business Premium. If you aren’t using Microsoft’s dialing or phone system capabilities, have 300 or fewer users, and have E3 licensing, read on – you may want to change your licensing. Read more.
Supply Chain Delays Cause Long Lead Times for IT Hardware
Regardless of things opening back up from following our last year and a half of COVID-19, this virus is still (and will continue) to have repercussions for years. One such consequence is regarding part shortages.
At the outset of the pandemic, hearing “shortages” conjured up mental images of household goods and medical supplies – toilet paper (what a wild time), cleaners, hand sanitizer, soda, medical gowns, and medical-grade face masks. While availability of those items has rebalanced, laptops, monitors, docking stations, and GPUs started to fall short in supply. And now we’re seeing a delay in switches, servers, access points, firewalls, smartphones, and even cars. For those of you who live near any auto manufacturer like me, you might see a sea consisting of thousands of cars or trucks that cannot be finished. So, aside from the monitors and laptop screens (glass shortage), what do these products have in common? What are those cars waiting on? Well, it’s something that is less than 1/1,000th the size of a car: computer chips. Read more.
The End of VMware Horizon Perpetual Licensing
VMware Horizon is a platform for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and allows organizations to virtualize desktops or applications for a more centralized system of IT service delivery. It can be a very powerful tool for some organizations, especially when serving a disparate, remote workforce.
Well, consistent with the industry’s vicious focus on making everything recurring revenue, VMware Horizon’s perpetual licensing model is going the way of the dodo. As of May 6, 2021 you will not be able to purchase perpetual VMware Horizon licensing. That is, say goodbye to paying upfront for and owning your Horizon licensing – it’s a subscription now. Then again, you may shrug at this – we’ve been paying for support and maintenance on a yearly or multi-year basis anyway, right? Read more.
Say Goodbye to Veeam Per-Socket Licensing
Well, we can’t say this is a surprise to anyone. We came to you in January of 2021 to let you know that if you didn’t already have active Veeam per-socket licensing for Standard or Enterprise, you weren’t eligible to buy per-socket licensing anymore for those levels. The phase-out of Veeam per-socket licensing continues: after July 1, 2022 socket licensing will no longer be available to Enterprise Plus customers.
We are here to help answer the following questions:What If I Have Socket Licensing Now? What If I Have Socket Licensing and Need to Buy More? What If I Have Socket Licensing and Want to Migrate to Universal? What If I Don’t Want Subscription Licensing? What If I REALLY Want Per-Socket Veeam Licensing and Don’t Have It Now? What If I REALLY Want Per-Socket Veeam Licensing and Don’t Have It Now? Read more.
Migrating off GoDaddy Office 365 Tenant: PowerShell Workaround
A couple of weeks ago, my team and I were preparing for migrating off GoDaddy Office 365 for a client. After a call with GoDaddy support, we validated that to do the move, we just needed to change the UPNs to the temporary .onmicrosoft.com domain. So, we took them at their word, and we did that after finishing our pre-seeding and were ready to go for the cutover. Or so we thought.
When cutover day came, GoDaddy support informed us that we instead must delete the entire environment before the client’s domain could be released. If you just went, “oof,” reading that, well, so did we. That wasn’t going to work for us (clients tend to need their data), and it certainly wasn’t what GoDaddy’s support had previously told us. Read more.
vSphere 7 Breaks SD Card Boot Storage
If you’re on VMware vSphere 7 and you can’t figure out why your SD cards keep dying, or if you’re about to upgrade to vSphere 7 and you use SD cards as your boot storage, this is for you. Basically, VMware reconfigured how vSphere interacts with the storage partitions on the boot device and SD cards are just not going to be able to handle the write intensity anymore, so you’ll need to change that out for another form of storage. Other flash boot devices like SSDs or BOSS cards are NOT affected as much by this behavior.
The good news is that it shouldn’t be a very difficult task – you should be able to expand the storage in your existing servers. But let’s get into the details… Read more.
We Hate to Tell You This: It’s Time to Upgrade Windows Server 2016
Server OS upgrades are a pain. They’re necessary, and there is a very real reason to do them…but that doesn’t make them any less painful How are yours going? Not great? Still trying to smash that last 2003 server into oblivion? Still have some 2008 R2s hanging around that you just aren’t that worried about?
Well, it’s time for a bit of perspective. You should already be upgrading off of 2016!First, what even are our targets on support? in short, we have (at best) 10 years of support on an OS, but full support is five years. To put that into perspective…. Read more.
VMware 7.0 ESXi Update 3 Pulled for Bugs
VMware pulled 7.0 update 3, 3a, and 3b for ESXi last week as well as vCenter 7.0 Update 3b due to excessive bugs/issues with the software. There had already been two updates to try to rectify these problems, but the issues ended up being too serious to keep trying to patch in-situ. These updates are no longer available on VMware’s website. So what does this mean? And if you’re about to update to VMware 7.0, there are some things you need to know first. Read more.
New Features in Veeam V11
As we’ve said many times before, we love Veeam because they always iterate and improve their product with extremely useful features and updates, and it’s clear they listen to their users. V11 is no exception. So, here are some of the things coming with Veeam V11 that we are truly excited about, including: Continuous Data Protection (CDP), Linux-hardened Repositories, Archive Tiering for Glacier and Azure Blob, and UI improvements. Read more.
