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TL;DR: The answer is an astounding NO.

Pliers it is then… sigh

Storage vendors are rolling their hands in delight while systems administrators, particularly backup admins are cringing at the thought.

Both Supermicro and HPE have the longest support of their products than the others.

You can basically get rack mount level performance from:

• Supermicro SuperWorkstation Tower Servers
• Lenovo Thinkstation P Series Server Towers
• HPE ML series Tower Servers
• Dell Precision Tower Workstations

In your situation, I’d be looking at ebay, serversupply, or other used hardware resalers that offer 2 generations back hardware. Used DDR4 based systems are abundant and cheap enough, go that route.

Have your group ask microsoft what the charges for Azure will be for your year 3 year 4 and year 5 commitments.

100% sure the Azure rep will gag on whatever they have in their mouths at that moment and start deflecting. If MS can fuck the US Government in a 10yr Azure contract, odds are pretty high they’ll do the same to Disney.

Source: Our company bought into O365+Azure+ADFS at a good rate for 3yrs, then got burned by MS once the honeymoon was over. They’re not going to make it fun for you all once your contract ends.

I manage 30 Esxi hosts with around 800 VMs currently on vSphere Enterprise licensing. Our company is preparing for the worst case by employing a 3yr plan involving:

• Upgrading all perpetual lics still under contract to vsphere 8

(So we can run on unsupported vsphere 8 for up to 3yrs. if needed or until a resolution is found)

• Assigning members from QC, Cyber security and Systems as an exploratory solutions planning group who report to the CIO and CTO.

(So we can explore different hybrid solutions, assign them for evaluation and give feedback based on those findings annually)

• Hiring a Reseller partner of ours to do an audit plus an impact analysis in moving our environment from VMware to one of the exploratory solutions planning group recommendations.

(My company fancies getting ‘non-biased’ opinions from external sources, so we tolerate it)

• Building active-active, multi -master, active-passive and active-failover hybrid solutions including those with SaaS vendors for our highest value systems.

(While expensive to do, this option gives us a clear nuclear level fuck you to VMware should pricing become too outrageous and we decide to pull out of renewal)

In the end, we will probably give VMware a 3yr probation period, regardless of cost and have a clear migratory path before that time should we decide that VMware’s TCO is no longer viable.

Yeah, we dumped Cisco for Aruba two years ago. Completely replaced the entire company core network infra. No major complaints.

On the Enterprise side of things, I was a huge VCE fan pre-Dell days. Only thing close to that now is Pure Flashstack, which isn’t bad, just pricey. I’m just not a Dell fan, Michael Dell is a fuck-whit.

Comparing my experience with Cisco B and C Class, HPE DL and Dell PE server experience over the past 20 years:

Cisco: Expensive, Good support/service during lifetime of product, excellent management tools w/o buying additional lics, reliable, but eosl/eol is short and poorly supportable after.

DELL: Just retired some 30 of their servers and storage. No regrets. Expensive, horrible support, licensing is a nightmare, but e360 and online tools were better than others. EOL/EOSL support is okay for a max of 2 yrs afterwards.

HPE: Just deployed 20 DL380G10+, Cheaper than other 2, licensing is a pita, support is meh, but InfoSight and support costs are cheap and there’s good support past eol/eosl.

I’ve done the whole white box thing like SuperMicro a number of times and while it is cheaper upfront, it’s a headache over time.

Then there’s California where NEM 3.0 makes it less than worth while to install or upgrade your existing solar installation.

It’s like people hate ads so much they’re willing to change browsers… gasp

Google had a revelation.

Yubikey ftw

Jira/Confluence (Atlassian) out, it was slow anyway. Gitlab onprem solution to replace it. If Gitlab ends up costing too much down the line, OSS gits will work just the same. Atlassian support is horrible anyway.

Then you think about how long ago it was we did all those dl ratios and auto bots promoting sites on UUNET, DALNET or others…

As someone who was Sun Certified 5.7.1 to version 10, I feel this way too hard as well.