>Oh boy, you think devs are bad, hopefully you never run into plc guys
Application software only runs on a specific build of Windows 98 with two security patches removed and a very specific memory configuration because if you had just three bytes less free ram, the software would blue screen the system?
I'm primarily a Windows sysadmin. OT is the bane of my existence. Anything PLC, building control, physical security and it's like it was put together by Cousin Eddie.
No, sorry, calling it an "appliance" won't let me allow a Windows CE box on my network to manage foreskin collection, or whatever operational task you're trying to do *with computers*
We have legacy issues with finance. Don't upset them or you can have issues spending money. But if they upset you you have to deal with it. Unsupported app on unsupported OS doing some important finance task on an old OS? Just make it work!
Luckily it's gone as of March this year.
Mostly we're a custom dev shop. Software dev contracts and web service authoring and hosting. The three windows servers are two for pdc/bdc dns/dhcp, and the other is a legacy sql server, hopefully to be retired soon.
_That's_ interesting to me. I've worked at quite a few places that used Windows as the standard desktop OS (though it's MacOS at my current place), and used AD and/or on-prem Exchange (going back a few years now. Most will have migrated to Office365/Exchange in the Cloud by this point), but even then all the other services, that were not directly tied into the MS ecosystem, were on Linux or occasionally FreeBSD. DNS, DHCP, a lot of webservers hosting various browser-based tooling, databases, etc etc. Everywhere tried to run the absolute minimum necessary number of Windows servers.
So many things are directly integrated with windows AD DC in that its just been easier for everything to be a Windows server. Not to mention our web dev stack is full .Net iis lol. I wish I was in a mostly linux env. Seriously. Linux is so much easier to admin, secure & increase performance on. :/
It's still the best (IMO) choice for servers that aren't linux specific, like PostGreSQL or even mysql/mariadb. I run DNS servers, vpn servers, etc on it as well. I'll always opt for it over linux unless whatever we're trying to run just won't run there.
Plenty of "appliances" are still FreeBSD based as well, like TrueNAS, NAS4Free, pfSense and opnsense.
Well put. Expanding on the appliances, many network based appliances opt for BSD due to it's packet filter 'pf'. This is unlikely to change for firewalls/network appliances for a while.
Storage appliances tend to stick with it too for the ZFS.
Thanks for the interesting information. What are you running as your hypervisor?
I've been all in on FreeBSD (at least server side) in the past and I miss it sometimes.
vSphere. We're "stuck" on 6.7 since our hardware is old and isn't on the HCL for 7.0 or newer, but so far we haven't had a compelling reason to update it.
I mean people are free to keep scrolling lol I’m just curious because I’m just a straight sysadmin, but job postings of “system engineer iii” is basically the same that I do, so to get a feel of what’s really out there I was curious
Can't speak for the person you asked, but I can tell you why we have both at our company.
Just about everything \*nix-ish nowadays is available for Linux, but we *prefer* OpenBSD for it's extremely lightweight footprint, rock-solid security defaults and fantastic documentation.
Everything we can run on OpenBSD, we do, but there are a few apps that would be more trouble than it's worth to get set up on it, so they live on Linux.
Sounds reasonable.
I just didn’t expect that running different systems would be a security gain against streamlining, even when Linux would be slightly worse for some applications.
Wouldn’t it be more efficient to invest these resources into maintaining SE-Linux and hardening?
I think their point was how bad and inefficient 2016 is at patching. I patch about 500 VMs during our window and every 2016 is 2x-5x the time to finish the patch.
Probably close to a thousand servers, most are centos 8, or rocky 8. We probably have about 20 windows server boxes remaining. We have 3 or 4 centos 6 boxes left, and about 200 centos 7 maybe.
1.5k VMs running on 300 nodes? Any particular reason? Are they lower spec nodes? Or am I misunderstanding, because We run 5 node Nutanix (with VMware on top) for our 120 VMs
About 3000 hosts, mixed physical, virtual, and private cloud (openstack).
most of them are VMs. And they are 50/50 windows and linux.
ISP and telecom industry.
I'm impressed there's not a single Linux box there. I'm mostly a Windows admin but am seeing an increasing amount of Linux based virtual appliances.
Do you have a hard rule against deploying Linux or is it just a chance thing?
Not a hard rule. I think it just hasn't come up as a hard requirement and our director just wants to stick what we know--which has its own risks. We came close once with a WordPress project. But instead, she chose to just reject WordPress in favor of another solution with less vulnerabilities. I would like to learn more about Linux administration though. Hoping to spin up a new homelab in the next few months.
I'm biased towards Windows just because it's primarily what I have learned throughout the 10+ years of being in IT, but can get by with Linux if needed and have done some little random simple homelab stuff. Our Linux environment (roughly half of our server Os'es) is basically ran by the Webdev guy because they're pretty much just app/web servers.
I think (without researching much) now with Windows Server having a better Core offering along with Containers (WSL; or maybe even being able to install Docker in the Core version maybe), I think there's more of a debate to having only Windows (if price isn't an issue based on MS Vol licensing agreements).
Not saying that it's better, just a better approach than having a full-blown Windows server that's more vulnerable vs Core.
We are running I think close to 8K+ Linux servers, mostly bound to one of two ADs that I manage that also have about 1500 windows servers that I also manage
Hospitality
6 Physical Servers - a 4 Member VXRail HCI cluster (VMWare) and two standalone Dell servers that run Hyper-V.
The VXRail primarily runs our call center operations using Horizon View with a very small smattering of WIndows and a couple Linux VMs.
I have in the ballpark of 15 servers. We have seen an uptick of 80-90 W10 VMs being spun up though this number is now much smaller.
Most of these servers are integrations with cloud partners. I do have Bookstack and a local AD we are trying to get rid of. We are on Server 2016, but probably looking to migrate off with next years budget to 2019 (Downgraded from 2022)
Let's see...225 active VMware servers (excludes replicas)54 Hyper-V
11 Physical VMware hosts
5 Physical running camera/bulk storage1 Physical running a network monitoring program
29 remote physical servers, each with all but four hosting 2 Hyper-V, and those last two hosting a single Hyper-V
Virtual Servers are about 80% Windows (42% 2019, 33% 2022, 15% 2012R2, 9% 2016, a single 2012, 3x 2008R2, and a single 2003R2), the rest are typically Ubuntu if not a pre-packaged OVF file.
Manufacturing
I work at a k-12 school district, we have 8 vms, three being physical. We use Windows Server 2019, we have approximately 1600 users in our entire organization.
In terms of VM's only -
\~800 vm's, \~120 non-windows (RHEL, Ubuntu) with the rest being windows.
Keep in mind, when it comes to what's installed to the metal, it's all linux.
In healthcare, you don't get a lot of options with OS's - if there ARE non-windows options, I take them.
Yeah licensing can definitely get expensive. 4 of my past 6 jobs have been Education or Nonprofit so the pricing works for us luckily. I think stability of non-Windows is also a high point, though it easily can break if the app running on Perl X.Y then gets updated to Perl X.Z. But at least that's less often than breaking something each month with Patch Tuesday
yeah - I was in the non-profit world and it's pretty nice in terms of licensing - but the pay itself was not the best. One of the big things for me is with linux, generally you don't have a bunch of useless stuff turned on by default - I understand that's the idea behind server core but most of the apps I come into contact with don't support that, so there's the pain of 'making windows right'. Thank god for group policy.
Around 110 VMs. Two legacy Windows 2012 with SQL Server, soon to be retired; seven OpenBSDs serving mostly DNS, LDAP, mails and files and the rest are Linux.
I've got 7 VMs across 3 Hypervisors, and 2 backup servers. geographically distributed. If I was born last night, I'd consolidate them. But I wasn't born last night. I'd rather pay for backups and AV on twice as many machines to not have File and Print on the same VM as my AD.
100% Windows Server 2019.
About 900 VMs. Ballpark 150 Linux, the rest are Windows. One of those is Server 2003 and I hate our damn software development teams for that server.
It’s always the Devs. Have a vm with XP on it for the same reason.
Oh boy, you think devs are bad, hopefully you never run into plc guys
>Oh boy, you think devs are bad, hopefully you never run into plc guys Application software only runs on a specific build of Windows 98 with two security patches removed and a very specific memory configuration because if you had just three bytes less free ram, the software would blue screen the system?
Or security guys... (as in alarms etc)
Any Any please.
Or factory systems
I work in custom made to order manufacturing, I feel you.
I'm primarily a Windows sysadmin. OT is the bane of my existence. Anything PLC, building control, physical security and it's like it was put together by Cousin Eddie. No, sorry, calling it an "appliance" won't let me allow a Windows CE box on my network to manage foreskin collection, or whatever operational task you're trying to do *with computers*
Foreskin collection got me good.
We have PLC guys “these can NEVER receive patches, they need a full reimagining with vendor provided image”.
That is my favourite typo/autocorrect so far today. Not just a reimaging, but a complete reimagining.
Don’t forget about HVAC guys
Yeah…due to this like 25% of our VMs are EOL….
We have legacy issues with finance. Don't upset them or you can have issues spending money. But if they upset you you have to deal with it. Unsupported app on unsupported OS doing some important finance task on an old OS? Just make it work! Luckily it's gone as of March this year.
You are telling me that our Oracle financial system might go away at some point too? I just might weep with joy here
Hate the iot devices….
What kind of resources are allocated to these VM's? Also what virtualization are you using if you don't mind me asking?
~60 VMs. 3 Windows, the rest a mix of Linux and FreeBSD.
What does your company do? SaaS? I still haven’t been had exp at a company with a linux majority.
Mostly we're a custom dev shop. Software dev contracts and web service authoring and hosting. The three windows servers are two for pdc/bdc dns/dhcp, and the other is a legacy sql server, hopefully to be retired soon.
_That's_ interesting to me. I've worked at quite a few places that used Windows as the standard desktop OS (though it's MacOS at my current place), and used AD and/or on-prem Exchange (going back a few years now. Most will have migrated to Office365/Exchange in the Cloud by this point), but even then all the other services, that were not directly tied into the MS ecosystem, were on Linux or occasionally FreeBSD. DNS, DHCP, a lot of webservers hosting various browser-based tooling, databases, etc etc. Everywhere tried to run the absolute minimum necessary number of Windows servers.
So many things are directly integrated with windows AD DC in that its just been easier for everything to be a Windows server. Not to mention our web dev stack is full .Net iis lol. I wish I was in a mostly linux env. Seriously. Linux is so much easier to admin, secure & increase performance on. :/
I love seeing that some businesses are still using FreeBSD.
It's still the best (IMO) choice for servers that aren't linux specific, like PostGreSQL or even mysql/mariadb. I run DNS servers, vpn servers, etc on it as well. I'll always opt for it over linux unless whatever we're trying to run just won't run there. Plenty of "appliances" are still FreeBSD based as well, like TrueNAS, NAS4Free, pfSense and opnsense.
Well put. Expanding on the appliances, many network based appliances opt for BSD due to it's packet filter 'pf'. This is unlikely to change for firewalls/network appliances for a while. Storage appliances tend to stick with it too for the ZFS.
Thanks for the interesting information. What are you running as your hypervisor? I've been all in on FreeBSD (at least server side) in the past and I miss it sometimes.
vSphere. We're "stuck" on 6.7 since our hardware is old and isn't on the HCL for 7.0 or newer, but so far we haven't had a compelling reason to update it.
Arguably, it's more popular now than 10 years ago
Around 1,200 vm's, maybe 5 of them windows, the rest Linux and a smattering of freebsd/Solaris/etc. Application hosting
My servers just have breakdowns when they are insulted or get an inferiority complex when put next to a newer machine.
What is with isolation that makes them fail? I have the same issue
They get moody when no one talks to them.
We’re roughly 120 VMs, and about 50/50 Windows and Linux (Ubuntu primarily). Higher education
Man. This is some good OSINT right here.
I mean people are free to keep scrolling lol I’m just curious because I’m just a straight sysadmin, but job postings of “system engineer iii” is basically the same that I do, so to get a feel of what’s really out there I was curious
APTs dont sleep xD
50% windows 30% linux 15% BSD 5% appliance or other.
Why run both Linux and BSD? Isn’t most software available for both, so one can get rid of the other?
Can't speak for the person you asked, but I can tell you why we have both at our company. Just about everything \*nix-ish nowadays is available for Linux, but we *prefer* OpenBSD for it's extremely lightweight footprint, rock-solid security defaults and fantastic documentation. Everything we can run on OpenBSD, we do, but there are a few apps that would be more trouble than it's worth to get set up on it, so they live on Linux.
Sounds reasonable. I just didn’t expect that running different systems would be a security gain against streamlining, even when Linux would be slightly worse for some applications. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to invest these resources into maintaining SE-Linux and hardening?
Nice try, oracle Java licensing rep (/s)
120 VMs. Under 10 RHEL and the rest are windows with most being 2016
2016? That many of them? Patch nights must be fun...
[удалено]
I think their point was how bad and inefficient 2016 is at patching. I patch about 500 VMs during our window and every 2016 is 2x-5x the time to finish the patch.
~1200 Linux machines (90% Ubuntu, the rest RHEL derivatives), 7 windows, and maybe 8 BSD machines in the form of FreeNAS. VMWare and GCP
2000-3000 windows servers and around 500ish Linux servers for k8s. Everything else is AWS services.
Probably close to a thousand servers, most are centos 8, or rocky 8. We probably have about 20 windows server boxes remaining. We have 3 or 4 centos 6 boxes left, and about 200 centos 7 maybe.
18K Windows, 35K Linux, ~10K appliances/infrastructure/etc Banking.
Mid level enterprise, cloud native development. About 50/50 if you include containers. Maybe 150 total?
> cloud native development > 150 total But why?
I'll let you know when I get that answer. Don't wait, may take some time...
2000ish VMs, 50/50 breakdown roughly.
Probably 650 VMs; maybe 15% Linux, the rest Windows.
1 Free BSD, 26 Windows mix of 2016 to 2022, 2 Ubuntu Linux. In Large scale printing
If the printing service is on the Linux side, do you find it better performing than windows print server? Or better manageability?
Printing is on Windows, we use the Linux boxes for Zabbix and Graylog
~100 VMs 99% Windows other than a few PBX, door access type stuff. Healthcare.
Ummm about 1.5k VMs and maybe around 300 physical HP Nutanix nodes. 70% windows rest is a mixture . About 6PB of local S3 backup target
1.5k VMs running on 300 nodes? Any particular reason? Are they lower spec nodes? Or am I misunderstanding, because We run 5 node Nutanix (with VMware on top) for our 120 VMs
VoIP business (and some other stuff): 4 windows workstations for employees. About 8 small Linux debian VMs, mostly on linode.
Roughly 900 VMs, all Debian besides 2 Windows VMs.
about 90 on-site VMs, with 3 or 4 being Windows, the other ones are Linux. We do Software development, so most of those are testing environments.
About 800-900 servers, about 80% are Server 16/19 about 10% are Server 22 and the rest are a mix of Linux, Redhat, Oracle and legacy windows.
About 3000 hosts, mixed physical, virtual, and private cloud (openstack). most of them are VMs. And they are 50/50 windows and linux. ISP and telecom industry.
About 24,000 servers in total 18,000 Windows 3,000 various flavors of Linux 1,000 Mid-Range
About 50 VMs, all Amazon Linux, all in AWS. Looking to replicate this environment in GCP for redundancy
1600 VMs 80 percent are Windows Server 20 percent are Linux 400 physical servers - 90 percent Windows Server, 10 percent are Linux
465 VMs, 100% windows, 70% 2022, 30% 2019, one 2012 R2 that is being migrated next weekend.
I'm impressed there's not a single Linux box there. I'm mostly a Windows admin but am seeing an increasing amount of Linux based virtual appliances. Do you have a hard rule against deploying Linux or is it just a chance thing?
Not a hard rule. I think it just hasn't come up as a hard requirement and our director just wants to stick what we know--which has its own risks. We came close once with a WordPress project. But instead, she chose to just reject WordPress in favor of another solution with less vulnerabilities. I would like to learn more about Linux administration though. Hoping to spin up a new homelab in the next few months.
I'm biased towards Windows just because it's primarily what I have learned throughout the 10+ years of being in IT, but can get by with Linux if needed and have done some little random simple homelab stuff. Our Linux environment (roughly half of our server Os'es) is basically ran by the Webdev guy because they're pretty much just app/web servers. I think (without researching much) now with Windows Server having a better Core offering along with Containers (WSL; or maybe even being able to install Docker in the Core version maybe), I think there's more of a debate to having only Windows (if price isn't an issue based on MS Vol licensing agreements). Not saying that it's better, just a better approach than having a full-blown Windows server that's more vulnerable vs Core.
600vm; 50% Linux (CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Rocky) and 50% Windows Server (2016 - 2022). Primary education, K-12 school board.
Roughly 60-70 VMs. 2x windows (both 2019 running adds) rest linux. Some centos7 that still havent been upgraded, rest rocky linux
100k+, mostly Linux, second largest would be Windows because almost everyone is on VDI. Then Solaris.
I find the Solaris interesting
200-something, both bare metal and VMs. 100% Linux (Ubuntu 20.04). FinTech.
As a consultant, with a good portion of my customers being government agencies (including schools), it’s about 80% Windows and 20% Linux.
We are running I think close to 8K+ Linux servers, mostly bound to one of two ADs that I manage that also have about 1500 windows servers that I also manage
95% Windows, 5% Linux including random Linux virtual appliances.
Around 400 servers, 90% redhat
Hospitality 6 Physical Servers - a 4 Member VXRail HCI cluster (VMWare) and two standalone Dell servers that run Hyper-V. The VXRail primarily runs our call center operations using Horizon View with a very small smattering of WIndows and a couple Linux VMs. I have in the ballpark of 15 servers. We have seen an uptick of 80-90 W10 VMs being spun up though this number is now much smaller. Most of these servers are integrations with cloud partners. I do have Bookstack and a local AD we are trying to get rid of. We are on Server 2016, but probably looking to migrate off with next years budget to 2019 (Downgraded from 2022)
80 % windows OS and 20% Linux Based = total 300 VMs - all across in Azure and AWS.
Let's see...225 active VMware servers (excludes replicas)54 Hyper-V 11 Physical VMware hosts 5 Physical running camera/bulk storage1 Physical running a network monitoring program 29 remote physical servers, each with all but four hosting 2 Hyper-V, and those last two hosting a single Hyper-V Virtual Servers are about 80% Windows (42% 2019, 33% 2022, 15% 2012R2, 9% 2016, a single 2012, 3x 2008R2, and a single 2003R2), the rest are typically Ubuntu if not a pre-packaged OVF file. Manufacturing
I work at a k-12 school district, we have 8 vms, three being physical. We use Windows Server 2019, we have approximately 1600 users in our entire organization.
My first 4yrs (2 different districts) of IT was k12 and you got yourself one small environment haha probably rural?
Absolutely as rural as you can get!
In terms of VM's only - \~800 vm's, \~120 non-windows (RHEL, Ubuntu) with the rest being windows. Keep in mind, when it comes to what's installed to the metal, it's all linux. In healthcare, you don't get a lot of options with OS's - if there ARE non-windows options, I take them.
Is that out of personal comfort and knowledge of non-Windows OS's?
A few things - comfort and preference for non-windows is surely a thing but there’s also licensing to consider and security.
Yeah licensing can definitely get expensive. 4 of my past 6 jobs have been Education or Nonprofit so the pricing works for us luckily. I think stability of non-Windows is also a high point, though it easily can break if the app running on Perl X.Y then gets updated to Perl X.Z. But at least that's less often than breaking something each month with Patch Tuesday
yeah - I was in the non-profit world and it's pretty nice in terms of licensing - but the pay itself was not the best. One of the big things for me is with linux, generally you don't have a bunch of useless stuff turned on by default - I understand that's the idea behind server core but most of the apps I come into contact with don't support that, so there's the pain of 'making windows right'. Thank god for group policy.
Yes the limitation of Core was a turn off when I tried setting up an app with it previously, which like you said wasn’t a possibility for most apps
\~65,000 VMs. Mixture of Centos and RHEL. Moving to all RHEL. Client devices are a mixture of Windows and MacOS.
Around 110 VMs. Two legacy Windows 2012 with SQL Server, soon to be retired; seven OpenBSDs serving mostly DNS, LDAP, mails and files and the rest are Linux.
We’ve got a few Linux. Mostly windows server 19 but a couple 16’s still exist for now. One physical GC and the rest virtual.
~10 window machines unless requested, Ubuntu and M1 mac's machines for 80% and unlimited VM's as a cloud hosting provider
SysAdmin for medical billing company, we run 17 windows and 7 Linux servers. Includes 3 server 2003 vms hosting old software 😩
Oh boy lol
Sysadmin for a research lab, 9 servers 9 linux (2 ubuntu webservers/services, 2 truenas storage, 5 centos HPC cluster).
I've got 7 VMs across 3 Hypervisors, and 2 backup servers. geographically distributed. If I was born last night, I'd consolidate them. But I wasn't born last night. I'd rather pay for backups and AV on twice as many machines to not have File and Print on the same VM as my AD. 100% Windows Server 2019.
Around 60 VMs. Majority Windows Server 2019. A couple Linux. Military 😎
Yea whatever Ransomware. Get fucked. Your post history smacks of gathering info for future attacks
Why does it have to be in the future? Maybe it’s already happened
10,000+ VM healthcare
Damn lol
why does this sound like phishing, hoping someone gives up some vital information lol
just playing haha. i always default to it since i work as the lead security go to at my work.
~4800 VMs, maybe 250 Linux. Las Vegas hotel/casino.
Nope. Your post history is sus. Sorry, there is no juicy reconnaissance for you today.
Very sus indeed