Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Win 11 hardware requirements

Everyone,

I have been keeping track of the the evolution of Windows 11 with a high interest since its announcement. I found the Windows 11 announcement particularly curious because during the Windows 10 marketing campaign we were told Window 10 would be the last operating system made by MS. Of course, those of us among the IT elite knew that announcement about Windows 10 being the last OS was mere marketing ploy when we first heard it. I truly hate marketing people some days.......

Here is my, and my various colleague's, stance on Windows 11:

-- We will deploy Windows 11 only with new PCs or with PCs that fully support Windows 11. We will not be doing upgrades - even wipe and replace upgrades - on hardware that does not fully support Windows 11
The reason for this stance is simple: We deploy technology only in fully supported scenarios. While there are a lot of (cough) "IT people" (cough) out there who like to break the rules and deploy things any old way they see fit, and while those ways may seem cheaper upfront, the number of times I've seen these unsupported scenarios blow up and cost tons of money and downtime are legion. And then the client is left staring at the IT cowboy wondering what to do next with no clear answers. Calling MS support is off the table since the configuration is not supported and when they call me I tell them that sure I can help if they agree to do things the documented way. Always remember, the only place Dirty Harry belongs is in the movies. A cop (IT cowboy) like that has no place in real life. Or in your place of business.

-- We will deploy Windows 11 only with networks that have a Windows Server 2022 Server.
While Windows 11 will clearly work on a network with a Windows Server 2019, or even 2016, domain controller and that scenario is fully supported, there will be some functionality that cannot be controlled in Windows 11 by the older domain controller. Out of all three stances, this is the one we are most likely to be flexible with since it isn't that big a deal in most cases, but we prefer to keep things uniform and I always push to make sure that at least the domain controller is on par with the latest workstation deployed at the client.

-- We have no plans to deploy Windows 11, or Windows Server 2022, until very late this year.
There are still a lot of announcements to be made about licensing and so on, I need to test Windows Server 2022 in my home Hyper-V cluster environment using the official RTM (Release To Manufacturing) bits, and there has yet to be an announcement about SQL Server 2022 so we are waiting on that. We also need time to prepare our clients for the massive change in licensing of Exchange 2022, SharePoint 2022, and so on, which is all going to a subscription model. The days of buying these various servers outright and running the same version for 10 years before someone like me comes along pulling your teeth to upgrade are almost over. The Subscription Model Cometh.

For those of you who are still on Windows Server 2012, or older, NOW is the time to get your upgrade going especially if you don't want to deal with the inevitable licensing changes coming with this new Windows Server and vendors such as AC who state they support the new Windows Server yet their support engineers sound like they've never even heard of it when you have them on the phone.

And I know there are quite a few of you out there still running Server 2012 or older. If you're current IT isn't discussing the options with you, or if you just want some different input or quotes for the sake of comparison, feel free to reach out to me. Many of you have in the past with database work and so forth and, believe it or not, I do general IT as well.

I consider November/December to be the cut-off months before I start recommending Windows Server 2022 - and by then you'll probably need to purchase downgrade rights from MS (more money) to run Windows Server 2019, anyway, so may as well move forward at that point.

Questions are always welcome. More news as it comes.

James Summerlin
Data Integration Solutions, LLC
james@dataintegrationsolutions.net
910 297 6241