Win Server 2008 or 2003, etc.

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Just a quick post for people thinking what to study. It's been said many times before and it's just the way I find it to be in the place I work.

Working in IT is not always about the newest technologies, amazing hardware and unlimited funds. More likely it happens to be: older reliable technologies, ~3-5 years old hardware and cost cutting. A lot of IT budget in your employment will go for licensing costs and not new super servers and newest operating systems. It all seems fine but when it comes down to 100's of workstations and 1000's of users licensing costs are really huge. This usually means that getting approval for another ~£2000 (decent server hardware will cost that much if not more + server operating system, ts licenses, etc.) just to upgrade from completely fine Windows Server 2003 is considerably harder.

I wanted to be smarter back then and I also did study a lot about Windows Server 2008. Now sometimes I struggle when some features I got used to on Windows Server 2008 are not available in 2003 version and I have to do research again how to do it. On the other hand transition the other way around is pure fun (2003 -> 2008 ).

 

True, true...

I used to work for a company owned by two VERY large companies (we're speaking of ntds.dit files +20gigs in size ;) ).

Anyway... our company therefore had a very special licensing deal from Microsoft which pretty much gave us unlimited support call access and unlimited numbers of licenses for software/OS installs. On top of that, HP/Dell hardware was heavily discounted to the point where a server would cost half as much as if you bought it as an individual from these manufacturers...

Then I moved to another company, which whilst larger than my previous one, is a LOT smaller than the two "large" companies were. Here we do not have such a licensing deal (due to size), and I've begun understanding the true constraints of making careful decisions when budgeting for hardware and software.

Let me tell you, that's a bl**** pain in the 'you know where'

*sigh*

guess that's life