Server Archives - EasySAM https://easysam.co.uk/tag/server/ Software Asset Management. Simplified. Tue, 19 May 2026 13:14:08 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0 https://easysam.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/easysam_icon-60x60.png Server Archives - EasySAM https://easysam.co.uk/tag/server/ 32 32 What Broadcom’s VMware overhaul means for your server strategy https://easysam.co.uk/knowledge-base/what-broadcoms-vmware-overhaul-means-for-your-server-strategy/ Tue, 19 May 2026 13:01:58 +0000 https://easysam.co.uk/?p=37520 Broadcom’s VMware licensing changes have hit IT teams hard, but the alternatives may finally be catching up.

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Broadcom’s VMware licensing changes have hit IT teams hard, but the alternatives may finally be catching up.

Published on 19th May 2026

If you’ve been running VMware for the better part of a decade, you probably didn’t expect to be rethinking that choice any time soon. Broadcom completed its $69 billion VMware acquisition in late 2023, and the licensing changes that followed have put a lot of IT shops in a difficult position.

As someone has previously put it, “There is no longer any such thing as a reasonably priced support option for VMWare. Broadcom has taken over and has basically told everyone except enterprise customers that they do not want our business.”

A January 2026, CloudBolt survey found that 86% of companies are now reducing their VMware footprint, though only 4% have fully migrated. Most are somewhere in between, working through their options at a pace that fits their environment.

What the licensing overhaul actually costs

Moving to subscription licensing wasn’t entirely unexpected given broader industry trends, but the bundling, core-count minimums, and partner program cuts that came with it caught a lot of IT teams off guard.

Subscriptions, bundles, and the end of Essentials Plus

Broadcom replaced perpetual licenses with mandatory subscriptions. If you budgeted VMware as a predictable line item for years, that change alone upends your planning. VMware also consolidated more than 160 products into a handful of bundles and phased out the Essentials Plus kit that a lot of IT departments relied on for their three-host clusters. The new pricing steers those customers toward vSphere Foundation (VVF), bundling Aria and vRealize alongside the hypervisor at three to five times the old price. One IT pro reported costs jumping from roughly $1,100 per socket per year to an estimated $20,000 per year under the new model. Most modest deployments never touch those extras.

Per-core pricing and how the maths works

The updated pricing model charges per core, with a 16-core minimum per CPU. If your server has 8 cores, you still pay for 16. Broadcom briefly tried imposing a 72-core minimum order before reversing it after backlash, but the per-core maths still hits smaller environments the hardest. Renewals have jumped 2x to 12x across the board, and you’ll generally see the steepest hikes if you’re running a modest cluster. Miss your renewal anniversary date and you could face a 20% retroactive penalty with no grace period.

Your existing perpetual licenses don’t just vanish, mind you. You can keep running them, but without patches, support, or access to new versions. For an IT team trying to buy time, that runway exists, though it gets riskier the longer you stay on it. One received a cease-and-desist letter from Broadcom after migrating away, so you may want to loop in legal resources (if you have them) before assuming your legacy licenses are a settled matter.

A shrinking partner ecosystem

In the U.S., only 19 providers remain from what used to be thousands of authorised VMware resellers. In January 2026, the company terminated its Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) program in Europe, a move that prompted an antitrust complaint with the European Commission two months later. If your reseller was among those cut, you likely found out with weeks of notice, not months. With limited buying paths, you have less leverage and fewer people to call when something goes sideways.

Deciding whether to stay, negotiate, or migrate

Your move depends on what you’re actually running, how deeply VMware is embedded in your operations, and whether the new pricing still works out. If you defer this decision, you’re still making one, just on Broadcom’s terms instead of yours.

When staying still makes sense

If your environment leans heavily on VMware-specific capabilities like vSAN for hyper-converged storage or NSX for micro-segmentation, you’ll spend well beyond licensing costs to migrate. That’s real money and real disruption—retraining staff, rebuilding automation, and re-qualifying your disaster recovery plan.

Some compliance frameworks depend on VMware’s formal certifications like FIPS 140-2 and Common Criteria, and not all alternatives have caught up yet. Staying doesn’t mean accepting the sticker price, though. If you’re going to negotiate, go in with a full audit of your actual core Civilization and a credible alternative you can point to.

The signals that it’s time to go

If your VMware deployment is primarily a hypervisor, meaning you’re running vSphere to consolidate servers and that’s about it, you’re paying bundle prices for a capability available elsewhere for a fraction of the cost or for free. You know it’s worth exploring alternatives when your renewal quote has doubled or tripled, or when the per-core minimums are pricing you well above what you were paying under the old per-socket model. The same applies if an Essentials Plus dependency no longer exists or your reseller vanished because Broadcom culled the partner program. If you’re checking several of those boxes, the question shifts from whether to move to how fast you can get there.

The gradual unwind

In CloudBolt’s survey, 56% of respondents said they’re staying on VMware while optimising their footprint, and 63% have changed their strategy at least twice since the acquisition. Gartner predicted that 35% of VMware workloads will migrate to alternative platforms by 2028. One CloudBolt respondent called the unwind an 18-to-24-month project, far more complex than a standard cloud lift-and-shift (and if you’ve done one of those, you know that bar is already high). Those timelines reflect larger environments, though. A leaner deployment with a few dozen VMs and no deep platform dependencies can realistically move much faster.

If you’re running a straightforward deployment, this typically means migrating movable workloads first while keeping the core environment on VMware until you’ve validated a replacement. This phased approach also gives you negotiating leverage—a vendor who knows you’re running Proxmox in your lab will approach that renewal conversation differently.

Where to find a realistic migration path

Three alternatives are central to the conversation right now. Each one fits a different kind of environment, and the migration tooling for all three has considerably improved since the acquisition.

Proxmox VE

Proxmox VE runs on the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor, charges no per-core licensing fees, and has absorbed the most VMware refugees since the acquisition. Backup support used to be the main hesitation, but Veeam now supports Proxmox with app-aware backup processing, and Proxmox’s own backup server handles incremental backups at no cost.

The ESXi import wizard covers most migration scenarios without command-line conversion, and a streamlined environment might be able to move over in a matter of weeks instead of months. You do give up enterprise vendor support unless you pay for a Proxmox subscription, and the platform lacks formal security certifications that some regulated industries require, but for most lean IT teams, the savings justify the tradeoffs.

Microsoft Hyper-V

If you’re already a Windows Server Datacenter shop, the hypervisor comes included at no additional cost, and the deeper your investment in Active Directory and Azure hybrid services, the more natural the fit. You might want to be cautious about Storage Spaces Direct, though. S2D handles the same role as vSAN, but it has a reputation for fragility that you’d want to carefully investigate before committing to it for production workloads.

Nutanix

Nutanix offers an enterprise hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) platform with more flexible licensing than VMware’s current model. If you need integrated management, vendor support, and a certified stack that open-source alternatives can’t yet match, it’s a strong commercial option. You’re trading one licensing relationship for another, but on more favourable terms.

Build your exit ramp before you need it

Nobody wants to re-litigate a technology choice they made a decade ago and haven’t thought about since. VMware ran, it was stable, and you budgeted for it without much drama. That simplicity was worth something, and its loss is genuinely frustrating.

You’re better positioned than you might think, though. The alternatives are more mature than they were two years ago, the migration tooling has caught up, and the community has already mapped most of the pitfalls. Whether you stay, migrate, or do both in phases, the goal is to have real options when that next renewal arrives. That’s worth starting on now, even if the full transition takes time.

Source

https://www.spiceworks.com/software/what-broadcoms-vmware-overhaul-means-for-your-server-strategy/

Image Credit

Thanakorn Lappattaranan via Vecteezy

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]]> Exchange, SQL and Windows Server Licensing 101 https://easysam.co.uk/knowledge-base/exchange-sql-and-windows-server-licensing-101/ Tue, 06 Jan 2026 11:15:09 +0000 https://easysam.co.uk/?p=36727 Microsoft are changing some of their licensing rules (which might already seem quite complex) - here’s the essentials you should know.

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Microsoft are changing some of their licensing rules (which might already seem quite complex) - here’s the essentials you should know.

Published on 6th January 2026

As Microsoft phase out older versions of some of their big server products, IT leaders are facing new decisions about how to stay compliant and cost-efficient. Understanding the current licensing landscape for Windows Server, SQL Server and Exchange Server can help organisations avoid costly mistakes and even uncover opportunities to save money and streamline management.

Exchange Server Moves to Subscription Edition

In October 2025, Microsoft officially deprecated older Exchange Server versions, including 2016 and 2019, and introduced Exchange Server Subscription Edition. While the software itself hasn’t changed dramatically, the licensing rules have.

Organisations running Exchange on-premises must now purchase licenses through Microsoft Volume Licensing — and, critically, Software Assurance is now required. Exchange Server SE customers must maintain active SA for both the per-server license and their client access licenses (CALs), whether user or device-based, to remain compliant.

What Software Assurance Really Covers

Software Assurance delivers tangible benefits beyond compliance. It’s essentially a subscription that renews every three years and typically costs about a third of the license’s original price. The payoff, however, can be significant:

  • Version protection lets customers upgrade to future releases (for example, Windows Server 2025) without repurchasing licenses.
  • License mobility allows virtual machines to move across hosts in clustered environments.
  • Bring Your Own License privileges enable organisations to carry existing licenses into cloud environments such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services.
  • Cold backup rights allow a standby disaster recovery server to run without a separate license if the primary server fails.

In short, software assurance adds flexibility and long-term savings potential to nearly every Microsoft licensing scenario.

Beware of This Common Microsoft Licensing Mistake

Client access licenses, or CALs, are always backward-compatible — for instance, a 2022 CAL can access a 2019 server — but not forward-compatible unless covered by active software assurance. Organisations that skip SA risk needing to repurchase CALs for newer servers.

This can really bite small businesses that assume that they’re compliant with their Microsoft licensing just because a piece of software they used “worked.” After all, if they didn’t have the right to use the software, wouldn’t Microsoft prevent them from doing so?

The answer is that sometimes you will be stopped from using unlicensed software, and sometimes you won’t be. Using software without a proper license could get discovered in one of Microsoft’s regular audits, at which point you’d be hit with an unexpected bill. Remember, just because a feature activates or runs successfully doesn’t mean it’s properly licensed.

Windows Server and SQL Licensing Updates

While the basics of Windows and SQL licensing remain familiar, there are key updates IT leaders should know. Microsoft now allows organisations to license virtual machines directly, instead of licensing the physical host, as long as SA is active.

This can be a cost-saver for environments running only a few Windows VMs on a large host. The minimum purchase requirement is eight core licenses per VM and 16 per environment.

SQL Server follows similar rules. Starting with SQL Server 2022, SA is required when licensing per virtual core. Without it, customers lose mobility and upgrade rights.

Extended Support and Downgrade Rights

SA also plays a crucial role when older systems reach end of support. Windows Server 2012, for example, will enter its final year of Extended Security Updates in October 2026. To qualify for ESUs, organisations must have active SA or purchase new Windows Server 2025 licenses with SA, then use downgrade rights to continue running 2012.

Those who let SA lapse face a steeper cost to regain compliance, as they’ll need to repurchase licenses entirely. Maintaining SA from the start is far more cost-effective and avoids unnecessary disruption.

Finally, Microsoft’s new commerce experience now governs most Microsoft 365 and cloud-based products, replacing the old Cloud Solution Provider model.

For traditional server licensing, organisations can still buy through Open Value or Microsoft Products and Services Agreement volume licensing programs. Open Value requires SA for all purchases; MPSA doesn’t, though Microsoft has stopped adding new products to it.

Microsoft licensing can be complex, even for seasoned IT professionals. Licensing experts can assist with transitions from older Exchange Server versions to the new Subscription Edition, guide customers through SA renewals, and optimise licensing across Windows and SQL environments.

Source

https://biztechmagazine.com/article/2025/12/windows-sql-and-exchange-server-licensing-101

Image Credit

Ahmad Juliyanto via Vecteezy

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]]> Microsoft puts Office Online Server on the chopping block https://easysam.co.uk/news/microsoft-puts-office-online-server-on-the-chopping-block/ Mon, 27 Oct 2025 13:47:52 +0000 https://easysam.co.uk/?p=36093 Support will come to an end of 31st December 2026. In addition to on-premises installations, Skype for Business users will also be affected.

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Support will come to an end of 31st December 2026. In addition to on-premises installations, Skype for Business users will also be affected.

Published on 27th October 2025

Microsoft will kill Office Online Server next year, creating a headache for anyone using on-premises Office web applications and the beleaguered holdouts sticking with Skype for Business Server.

The retirement is scheduled for December 31, 2026. After this, there won’t be any more security fixes, updates, or technical support from Microsoft. “This change is part of our ongoing commitment to modernising productivity experiences and focusing on cloud-first solutions,” the company said.

Office Online Server provides browser-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for customers who want to keep things on-prem without having to roll out the full desktop applications. Microsoft’s solution is to move to Microsoft 365, its decidedly off-premises version of its applications. The company said it is “focusing its browser-based Office app investments on Office for the Web to deliver secure, collaborative, and feature-rich experiences through Microsoft 365.”

Other than migrating to another platform when the vendor pulls the plug, affected customers have few options.

The announcement will also hit several customers running SharePoint Server SE or Exchange Server SE. While those products remain supported, Office Online Server integration will go away. The company suggested Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise and Office LTSC 2024 as alternatives for viewing and editing documents hosted on those servers.

Skype for Business customers will also lose some key features related to PowerPoint. Presenter notes and high-fidelity PowerPoint rendering will go away. In-meeting annotations, which allow meeting participants to write directly to slides without altering the original file, will no longer be available, and embedded video playback will run at lower fidelity. Features like whiteboards, polls, and app sharing shouldn’t be affected.

Microsoft’s solution is a move to Teams, which the company says “offers modern meeting experiences.”

Office Online Server launched in 2016 and is the successor to Office Web Apps Server 2013. At the time, Microsoft said it “recognises that many organisations still value running server products on-premises for a variety of reasons.”

“With OOS [Office Online Server], you get the same functionality we offer with Office Online in your own datacenter.”

There is currently no successor for Office Online Server. Few users may know it exists, but the fact that it is retiring is going to hurt those who prefer to keep data and processing on-premises without touching Office LTSC 2024.

Source

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/22/microsoft_office_online_server/

Image Credit

Tawanda Razika via Pixabay

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]]> Microsoft teases pay-to-patch plan for Windows Server 2025 https://easysam.co.uk/news/microsoft-teases-pay-to-patch-plan-for-windows-server-2025/ Mon, 28 Apr 2025 10:28:00 +0000 https://easysam.co.uk/?p=35041 Microsoft will transition Windows Server 2025 hotpatching from a free preview to a paid subscription model starting on July 1st.

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Microsoft will transition Windows Server 2025 hotpatching from a free preview to a paid subscription model starting on July 1st.

Published on 28th April 2025

Microsoft has announced that its preview of hotpatching for on-prem Windows Server 2025 will become a paid subscription service in July.

Hotpatching allows software updates to be applied without requiring a reboot. It’s a common approach that’s available for the Linux kernel, VMware products, and the Xen hypervisor. Admins like it because it allows security updates to be implemented without requiring reboots – and therefore without having to find a change window or convenient moment for an outage.

Microsoft already offers hotpatching for Windows Server: Azure Edition and version 2022 running in its Azure cloud. The company says its Xbox team is a big user.

In August 2024 the Windows behemoth announced a preview of the same functionality for Windows Server 2025 running in Azure.

A month later, the software giant teased a preview of hotpatching for Windows Server 2025 implementations controlled by its Arc hybrid-and-multicloud management tool.

That preview meant hotpatching came to Windows Server 2025 Standard and Datacenter edition, and made it possible to use hotpatching on-prem.

“This feature will be a game changer; simpler change control, shorter patch windows, easier orchestration,” Microsoft’s general manager of Windows Server Hari Pulapaka wrote at the time, adding “and you may finally get to see your family on the weekends.”

Last Thursday Microsoft announced the preview will end on June 30th – and be replaced by a subscription service that costs $1.50/core/month.

A post by Windows Server Product Marketing Manager Janine Patrick and Senior Program Manager Artem Pronichkin explained that the service aims to deliver eight hotpatches each year.

“It follows a three-month cycle with the first month as a baseline month (monthly cumulative update) followed by two months of hotpatches. During baseline months the machines will need a reboot,” the pair wrote, before explaining that the baseline months are January, April, July and October. They also advised “On rare occasions, for security reasons we may have to ship a non-hotpatch update during a hotpatch month which will also need a reboot. But the goal will be to provide up to eight hotpatches in a year.”

The pair argue hotpatching “can decrease the ‘window of vulnerability’ which can result if an administrator might normally delay an update and restart after a Windows security update is released” and also argue that “hotpatching can save significant time and ease the inconvenience of a traditional ‘patch Tuesday’.”

Users will not be required to adopt hotpatching: Microsoft will continue to deliver software updates on its current schedule.

While Windows Server 2025 machines will need to be managed by Arc to use hotpatching, using Arc for this new offering won’t incur a cost.

Those who are testing the hotpatching preview will automatically be rolled onto subscriptions from July 1st. To avoid that, disenroll before June 30th.

Azure Editions of Windows Server will continue to get hotpatching at no cost.

Source

https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/28/windows_server_2025_hotpatching_subscription/

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Akarapong Chairean via Vecteezy

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]]> Demand for server virtualisation software rises as cloud and OS technologies proliferate https://easysam.co.uk/news/demand-for-server-virtualisation-software-rises-as-cloud-and-os-technologies-proliferate/ Wed, 25 Jan 2023 10:50:08 +0000 https://easysam.co.uk/?p=26471 An increased need for high speed data centers combined with a rapid shift to the cloud are driving the need for the necessary infrastructure

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An increased need for high speed data centers combined with a rapid shift to the cloud are driving the need for the necessary infrastructure

Published on 25th January 2023

According to Fact.MR, a market research and competitive intelligence provider, the global server virtualization software market is estimated to achieve a valuation of US$ 16 billion by 2033, expanding at a 7.1% CAGR from 2023 to 2033.

Server virtualization is a cost-effective technique to deliver web hosting services while maximizing the use of current resources in IT infrastructure. Servers only utilize a small part of their computing power without server virtualization. Since the workload is allocated to only a subset of the network’s servers, servers lie idle. Data centers get overloaded with underutilized servers, resulting in resource and power waste.

Key Takeaways from Market Study

  • The global server virtualization software market amounted to US$ 8 billion in 2022.
  • The market is predicted to evolve at a CAGR of 7.1% during the forecast period (2023 to 2033).
  • Revenue from the sales of server virtualization software is expected to reach US$ 16 billion by 2033.
  • The United States market was worth US$ 2.6 billion in 2022.
  • The OS-level virtualization segment is projected to increase at a CAGR of 5.5% from 2023 to 2033.

Competitive Landscape

The market for server virtualization software is highly competitive. Key players in the server virtualization software market are using various development techniques such as mergers and acquisitions, collaboration, and product launches to increase their market share and consumer base.
  • VMware, Inc., a prominent cloud computing and virtualization technology company based in the United States, confirmed the continuation of its partnership with IT behemoth Microsoft Corp. in August 2022. The partnership sought to provide enterprise accessibility to multi-cloud services in Microsoft Azure using VMware vSphere. Azure VMware Solution was introduced as part of VMware Cloud Universal to give customers a cost-effective and versatile cloud solution.
  • In May 2022, Red Hat, Inc., a leading US-based software company, partnered with US Department of Energy (DOE) laboratories to develop cloud environment standards in high-performance computing (HPC). The partnership sought to provide solutions for the efficient operation of ML, AI, and DL-based HPC workloads.
  • Alibaba Cloud, a subsidiary of Alibaba Group, announced 'Yitian 710' server chips for usage in its data centers in October 2021. Alibaba Cloud also revealed the creation of its proprietary servers, dubbed 'Panjiu,' which will be powered by these chips. The combination is anticipated to boost cloud services by lowering energy consumption and increasing computing performance.
  • Google LLC revealed an expansion of its Chrome Enterprise Recommended partner program to install the Chrome Operating System (OS) in contact centers in September 2021. The expansion is intended to provide a variety of benefits, including certified contact-center solutions, a secure platform and remote management, and access to virtualization desktop infrastructure.

Key Companies Profiled

  • Amazon.Com, Inc
  • Hewlett-Packard Co.
  • Broadcom Inc
  • IBM Corp
  • Capgemini SE
  • Cisco Systems, Inc
  • Citrix Systems Inc
  • Dell Inc
  • Microsoft Corporation

Regional Analysis

North America is expected to dominate the global server virtualization software market during the forecast period. The regional market is projected to be fueled by increased adoption of server virtualization, technological advancements, and increased investments in cloud-based services.

Moreover, the United States is leading the North American market due to the presence of major global information technology and telecommunications businesses such as VMware, IBM Corporation, and Cisco Systems, Inc.

Segmentation of Server Virtualization Software Industry Research

By Type:

  • OS-level Virtualization
  • Para Virtualization
  • Full Virtualization

By Deployment:

  • Cloud
  • On-premise

By Organization:

  • Small & Medium Enterprises
  • Large Enterprises

By End Use:

  • BFSI
  • Healthcare
  • IT & Telecommunication
  • Government & Public Sector
  • Transportation & Logistics
  • Manufacturing
  • Others

By Region:

  • North America
  • Latin America
  • Europe
  • APAC
  • MEA

Source

https://www.yahoo.com/now/demand-server-virtualization-software-rises-143000689.html

Image Credit

Pixabay via Pexels

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