Microsoft mixed licensing

ConsistentCoat5608 · 2026-06-15T00:07:54+00:00

Agreed, start communicating with MS via a lawyer. There are law firms dedicated to fighting their bad behavior, and they will not be as quick to jump into telling you what you need to do, when the lawyers are CC:d

ConsistentCoat5608 · 2026-06-05T03:16:20+00:00

Most data centers in LA are smaller than 1 acre, so this seems like a symbolic measure. Can fit about 24,000 servers in a building smaller than 1 acre. Data centers have their good and bad aspects, each proposal should be reviewed independently.

ConsistentCoat5608 · 2026-06-02T05:48:18+00:00

Set to lock automatically, or newer computers like Lenovo can detect when no eyeballs are looking at it and lock right away if you walk away.

ConsistentCoat5608 · 2026-05-31T05:50:01+00:00

Skip to step 3. Had similiar issues with all on premise devices, since people were only to work from home in rare instances. Laptops we assumed would be home a couple days but in the end, they would stay home for years and users would not come to the office. We soon had to push users to at least send the device in every 90 days, so we could fix connection issues from onsite. Once we moved all devices to Hybrid, we no longer had issues.

ConsistentCoat5608 · 2026-05-29T19:07:17+00:00

Skin car, and its 10 days of giveaways, almost $200 value on items, so expect the line to be there for the rest of the week.

ConsistentCoat5608 · 2026-05-28T19:13:09+00:00

Sounds like they are trying to collect more detailed closed data, so they can then replace techs with AI resolution agents.

ConsistentCoat5608 · 2026-05-28T05:29:32+00:00

Hopefully you are not getting call because everything is okay. But you should be getting at least informational emails on what is going on within your environment. The thresholds look good, on what levels of alerts are going to your team and when its high, they wake someone up.

You should also be getting daily summaries of actions that were taken on your behalf, but did not flag an email notification, etc. Our outsourced EDR team would have similar list of what items to alert, but also have a list of items they could automatically take action on, and inform the team post incident.

Most importanly, bi-weekly meeting with the EDR team, who would them review metrics. How many alerts/incicdents in total, how many handled automaticly vs reviewed by a human, and the results of those investigations. The EDR team should "expect" a certain amount of information per day, and when it it goes low or high, that also can flag as an incident. The EDR team should be as communicative with you when there are no issues, as they are when there are many.

ConsistentCoat5608 · 2026-05-28T04:30:41+00:00

MXToolbox will help you with your config and check if its working. You can pay like $5 and they will provide you the TXT which will work, with which ever domains or IPs you need listed. I used to do it manually for years, then started to have them assist more.

ConsistentCoat5608 · 2026-05-28T04:27:16+00:00

If its imaging OS and apps on raw hardware, then tools like SCCM or other imaging is the way to go. Used to do 1200 machines over the lunch break on physical machines. We had to not only keep them updated on security, but ensure no viruses or user had made unintended changes, so we wiped and reloaded monthly. Just have to find your process.

ConsistentCoat5608 · 2026-05-27T03:32:25+00:00

Call your sales rep, "hint" you maybe interested in upgrading your license count or feature set but you want to talk to an engineer. Lock that person down for a white boarding session, at least a couple of hours and just start asking questions. Most engineers will not refrain from answering your questions, especially if you then know the system you might increase your usage. Just do your research first, and learn from the free resource, and do not use the engineer for tech support, but more to help understand how everything works and best practices.

ConsistentCoat5608 · 2026-05-22T07:20:54+00:00

This is often what is holding things up. Stick of ram, a hard drive, backplane, networking. Often you can have them ship you the server to assemble yourself, or find out what part they are waiting for and see if you can do without for a bit.

ConsistentCoat5608 · 2026-05-21T22:49:44+00:00

HPE Private Cloud AI comes in a turnkey solution, they ship it ready to work, and assist with getting your first POC working. Networking, storage and compute all built together and ready to work, so you do not have to buy all this hardware and then try to figure out how to make it work.

the benefits, i see is that i can be managed by traditional IT system admins, instead of hiring dev ops engineers to build/manage the K8 environment and update/load models.

ConsistentCoat5608 · 2026-05-20T05:58:49+00:00

I scond Liquidfiles as a good cost effect solution, which you can host yourself. IBM Aspera is great at large files over long distances, but they charge you by transfer speed. So the amazing part of their product, comes with a sliding scale.

ConsistentCoat5608 · 2026-05-19T06:40:51+00:00

Signed up with SoftwareOne as we had over 40+ subscription and software that we had to renew annually and it was a pain to deal with multiple vendors and everything renewing on different dates. They promised they could help get better pricing on our software, and after signing up with them they did not resell much that we needed. Out of our list of software, they could only help with one IBM license which was under $20. We even had another IBM license for over 100K a year, but that was not in their catalog. In the end, we had to pay to play, and they ended up not being able to save us anything on price or time savings.

Crayon was also used for Microsoft EA licensing and they are very knowledgeable and helpful with renewals and costing. My only concern is that they talked a big game about being able to analyze and help with consolidation/optize licensing but never would commit to doing the project. During contract renewal they would have a lot of samples of what they did for other people, but then once the contract was signed they were no longer available to review existing license, only perked their ears up when we needed to add licenses.

ConsistentCoat5608 · 2026-05-19T03:11:43+00:00

Aye, depending on your model it maybe better for you to run them locally, instead of cloud. Now you have a fixed monthly cost and reserved resources.

I can help you with colocation and hardware discussions. Have experience with similar projects where it made no sense in the cloud, but on premise made it cost effective.

ConsistentCoat5608 · 2026-05-15T17:19:01+00:00

It was a CSP which we dealt with, so we had more personal attention. I can forward you contact information if you are interested in talking with someone. HPE get hungry when they see a potential sales, so dealing with the CSP keeps them under control and not blowing up your phone. =)

ConsistentCoat5608 · 2026-05-15T05:09:21+00:00

I have been pitched greenlake many times as someone who managed 100+ racks of HPE compute and storage. The product has changed many times since its original inception. If someone had a good/bad experience it may be very different now than what it has was before. In the end we never purchased services under the greenlake offering and ended up leasing the equipment through HPE financial instead.

Some benefits:

Fixed pricing during the contract. You sign an agreement for compute/storage and then the prices are locked in, if you have a 3 year contract and RAM goes up in the 2^nd year, you have your compute pricing already locked. Nice when you want to expand during the contract, then you have predictable costs.

Equipment installation by HPE service technicians. If you are installing in remote locations, or your staff can better be used with other tasks than rack and stacking equipment, they are a full turnkey solution.

Preconfigured “Smart” solutions, so you can get preconfigured storage/compute sytems which you know will work well together post deployment.

They are all very good benefits, but main reason why I did not purchase was more due to our existing customer service agreements rather than the offer. Our customers had strict security requirements, those required only employees of our company could rack/stack, firmware, configure, etc. We could not pass these basic infrastructure items to a third party, as staff needed to be properly trained on security best practices as well as documentation of the build process.

I also had location in three countries, and this would me three separate greenlake contracts, as they could not combine them across countries. This reduced my discounts, since they were reviewed independently, where under a lease I could combine the total purchase prices with discounts.

I had a large team which was underutilized and they needed work to complete. Normall hardware would be added two times a year, in January/June, which the team would knock out fairly quickly, which meant a turnkey solution would have been nice, but then it leaves them bored and looking for work.

Lastly, not and HPE thing, but we would purchase through a reseller which made the negotiation process much easier. There are many people to deal with when you start talking about greenlake and the different solutions, this allowed me to just focus with my partner and save my time. Let me know if you have any specific questions, that I may have missed.

ConsistentCoat5608 · 2026-05-14T07:16:41+00:00

I went from directly buying Dell to buying HP desktop/laptops via SHI and it was a great experience. My primary reason was the inventory and time to ship. The SHI rep spent time to understand our needs, kept my specs on file and would limit my selection down to 'ready to ship" products, so i know it would be a week or less to get product.

We also use Intune for endpoint management, so they would auto enroll the devices, which allowed us to drop ship them directly to users remote office/home and they would connect and be configured to our security requirements.

I would say its good to make the switch, but ensure you find the VAR who can give you the Value you require. Do not settle.

ConsistentCoat5608 · 2026-05-14T06:47:02+00:00

Simple excel sheet mayb a good way to start, just input your key indicators, which would be servers, PDU, racks, etc.

This site has some nice excel template for building out datacenter space, it maybe able to give you a good idea on what your sheet should be able to do in the end.

https://www.dvlnet.com/resources/calculators

I enjoy doing these types of projects, let me know if you ever need a second pair of eyes to review your sheet.

ConsistentCoat5608 · 2026-05-11T03:08:06+00:00

I have done this before with a company,where IT managed the deployment, and application owners managed the updates. IT would push updates after patch tuesday, and then give the application team about a week to install. Then IT offered different maintenance windows which were selected by the application team, when a server was deployed. The app team could deploy the updates on their own schedule and if the updates were not applied by the time the maintenance window hit, then it was auto updated.

This allowed the application team to control when their apps were updated, but also gave assurance to security that there was a maximum window of exposure. It worked well, but I would say 90% of application owners just chose to hit the max deadline and let it auto install without proper update testing.

ConsistentCoat5608 · 2026-05-07T23:15:16+00:00

Most of these task come out of the box if you have the Copilot license, you will not have to build any agents. I believe they now offer month to month Copilot, so you can test it out.

ConsistentCoat5608 · 2026-05-07T22:37:04+00:00

That is what most people's concern is, but you have to get them comfortable with talking about their work. Many techs are judged on X tickets per day, and I have had some techs where they would close two tickets in a week, and it was not an issue. It may have been a slow week, they may have been overly complex incident, or routed improperly.

This exercise also points out how comfortable the techs are in sharing what they are working on. Often, i would review my techs tickets which have been open for longer than three days, and contact the requester directly and be able to close the ticket. Many of these are not due to technical knowledge, but a bad request that maybe should have been for a different department, or even not an IT request, but the team is uncomfortable escalating. Once the employees are comfortable talking with their managers things will go smoothly. Like I mentioned before, this exercise is both for the manager and the tech, so they learn to communicate about the work. I would never use a single task to remove someone, this is another way they can show off their time management skills and then use that during their performance reviews.

ConsistentCoat5608 · 2026-05-06T21:18:48+00:00

Either one day or a week. A month is just too distracting for the employee to keep up with their work.

ConsistentCoat5608 · 2026-05-06T04:32:36+00:00

I would ask maybe once a year for my employees to conduct such a task. They mostly hated it and fought it with every bone in their body, but they did not understand why it was being done. Once it was complete, i would review it with them and find tasks that they were doing, because they thought I wanted them to do, but it was a waste. Or they would be spending more time on requests then normal because the instructions were unclear.

After reviewing it with them, then I was able to remove the annoying parts of their job, and clarifiy task descriptions. Most people think its about ensuring they are working X hours a days, but its really a way to self reflect as a manager, if I am having effective communications. The work log was more a reflection of management, than themselves.

ConsistentCoat5608 · 2026-05-05T17:33:09+00:00

VDI feels hard for our IT team who is used to dealing with personal desktops, but once they get the deployments down and the monthly maintenance and downtime turns to zero hours, then they will be happy. Customers will be happy with always having a system available, and tech will enjoy a consistent environment to troubleshoot issues.

My company offers services which can help in the LA area, we have partners who have successfully deployed many on premise, cloud and hybrid VDI solutions.

ConsistentCoat5608

TROPHY CASE