No More Downtime

  • Comments posted to this topic are about the item No More Downtime

  • I hope people remember that the downtime that matters is the experience that end user experiences, and not just the theoretical downtime of a system.

    I host my wiki on a project that won't even let me document the downtime.

    How do you document the downtime on your systems?

  • While the idea sounds great in theory, it looks like (at present at least, on the Windows side,) this relies on a install of Windows Server 2016 Core (which is further stripped down by removing language packs and such.)

    The issue for most people I think, is there seems to be very little adoption of Server Core.  I came across a thread on Reddit over the weekend (r/Sysadmin) where someone was indicating the main reason they don't use Core is there's no good substitute for Device Manager (and that includes PowerShell,) making it very difficult to update drivers or install drivers.  Personally, when we were planning our migration to Windows Server 2012R2 / SQL 2014, I was very tempted to go to Core simply to reduce the monthly patching I have to do.  Unfortunately, many of the required software we have to have on our servers, won't work / install on Core...

    Perhaps if MS can improve the tooling for managing Core installs, we'll see more organizations start using it, and then we'll start to get "zero" downtime patching...

    But I'm not betting on it being soon.

  • Yeah, core is going away, or at least not the time now. People aren't comfortable enough with PoSh. There is work to remove downtime in the main Windows Server release (and hopefully W10/11/etc desktop versions).

  • I could moan about the addiction Windows has for reboots and remember the many months of uptime commonly seen on MVS/370 where a patch seldom required an outage.  (I think I did just moan...)

    It really is good that Microsoft are looking at how to move Windows to be a low or no downtime OS that is still patched and up to date.  Windows Server 2019 looks like a good step along this road, but I hope it is not that last one that Microsoft take.

    Original author: https://github.com/SQL-FineBuild/Common/wiki/ 1-click install and best practice configuration of SQL Server 2019, 2017 2016, 2014, 2012, 2008 R2, 2008 and 2005.

    When I give food to the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor they call me a communist - Archbishop Hélder Câmara

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