Thinking about Windows Support
Rob Kambach posted a question in a Linked In group about dumping support for Vista. Other than the fact that I have never seen Vista on a plant floor one should also consider the support cycle for this OS and others. Here’s a great summary page from Microsoft.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/products/lifecycle
Everyone knows MS has been dragging XP along way beyond initial plans. I suspect, however, due to the pitiful uptake of Vista along with the general acceptance of 7 that the same won’t happen for Vista.
Take this page and use it to beat your penny pinchers about the head and shoulders when trying to convince them why you need to get off of XP and join the rest of the world. While it still feels like 7 is the new OS it’s been out since 2009.
Thoughts, comments?
I think maintaining an old OS that nobody uses is a waste of money, but some customer might not have options to upgrade to win7 :
Last week we’ve been consulted by an African mining company to upgrade their intouch application in order to support Vista …
Since they don’t have the customer first support, the licence cost is really big for them to upgrade. I’ve suggested them to wrap their existing application in a VM.
Doing this I’ve avoided installing intouch on vista, but I’ve encouraged the customer to remain on something even older !
Virtualization is promotted by everybody (including us), but it will help maintaining legacy systems
Maybe WW could stop supporting it but should provide a kind of technote explaining known issues about old versions, so the customers know what they risk it they remain on a legacy system.
Nicolas
I just touched Vista for the first time ever last month, when borrowing a client’s loaner laptop for their office domain. But I don’t think they’re running Vista on their SCADA system. We mostly run XP virtual machines in house, and see 2000, XP, and some 7 on workstations on location. I’m sure if I had clients using Vista, I’d feel stronger about Microsoft support. But the fact that WW had, what, 6 or 9 months running System Platform 3.5 on Windows 7 with no service packs or patches implies a lot about that the robustness of that combination…
My first foray into System Platform was on a big server running Windows Server 2008, based on Vista.
Never again. I ended up being flown back to the site as an emergency because the server went crazy and the plant was on the verge of shutting down. I installed the Windows 7 based Server 2008 R2, and the system has run for years since without a problem.
Since that episode, my opinion has been set: Vista has no place running anywhere on a Wonderware system. Cutting support wouldn’t just be good because it’s an old operating system, its good because Vista doesn’t run Wonderware very well.
As I proposed in Rob’s LinkedIn thread, I think that closing the books on Vista is a good idea. Like many of you I have not seen any Vista deployments in manufacturing but Windows Server 2008 was adopted to some extent. Also, it does not make sense to support old infrastructure with new versions of Wonderware software. In most cases it is far more important to support the latest Microsoft versions.
It is also good that support is dropped for XP and 2003. I know that many are still running those but if you do and have not started to plan for an upgrade the time to start is now!