However, to a business, you can not consider "best effort" as supported. A company may not be able to afford to go down a path that they may not be able to get help for a problem on. Some companies will assume that risk themselves with the understanding that they probably have another way to accomplish what they want. For instance, they have other hardware based machines with whatever isn't supported in the virtual environment or possibly they roll back to the supported way. I do think though that every time some company assumes the risk on their own because MS will not give official support for a configuration (ESX comes directly to mind) and it works great and customers don't have an issue, MS has further weakens their position as a support organization. However, that being said, I understand MS can not guarantee support for every single possible thing people will do out there. But there are times (like ESX) where the reasoning behind the lack of support seems a bit hokey from those on the outside looking in.
Back to topic, anyone who hears best effort support and calls that supported is playing the wish and hope game. It is better to call it unsupported and then if the management can stomach that you can go forward with it and if there is a problem you try to get MS to help and if they help as much as they can and then fall back to "We are sorry, we can not help you any longer on this" then there isn't some huge surprise to anyone. MS (and everyone else) calls it "best effort" so that they have an official easy out. If the intent was and the ability was to support it then they would call it fully supported. Where they opt out is entirely up to them. I have been in the situations where we had to make the decision of should we go forward with this or not knowing that it is simply best effort support. Depending on how gutsy I was feeling or how safe I felt about the specific item, you make a call from there. For instance, Alliance told one of my former customers that something they were doing was unsupported in the realm of GPOs, something that had been in place and functioning perfectly for years. The customer contacted me as I was around when the design was built (wasn't my design but I liked it) and had the history. I laughed as I recalled originally getting the mechanism from MS and we were not told then it was unsupported, in fact, at the time it was the only way to do what needed to be done. MS had lost all of the history on it because the people involved then had moved on and MS has poor corporate memory like many companies. Anyway, Microsoft proposed the new solution to handle what needed to be done and quite frankly IMHO, it was a trainwreck and showed no real thought or attempt to help the customer and would have drammatically increased the complexity of the environment. The solution that had been designed several years ago, even though MS was now saying was unsupported was so elegant and worked so well and had been working for multiple years so the customer told MS they were going to continue using it. MS said that it may break in a future version and that customer X was the only one doing it. My comment to that was MS has no clue who is doing it, they didn't even remember giving out the original method in the first place to this customer which I recalled clear as day. On top of that they had people onsite daily at this customer every year since Windows 2000 was launched and had finally "learned" that it was being done some 5 years after the fact and called it unsupported. Pardon me if I don't exactly trust the statement that they are the only company in the world that has done it. The solution wasn't brilliant, it was simple and elegant. Anyone trying to accomplish the same thing (a common task for larger environments) and who had looked at the default configuration would have probably come up with the same design if they were looking for simple. Plus, who knows how many MS folks handed out the same tools too... Quite honestly though to wrap all of this up, everything is to some extent best effort. Just because you have paid for the product or paid for the additional service contract is no guarantee that the products will work for you in the way you want or that MS will figure out why something isn't working in the time frame you need. I have dealt with numerous issues where MS has never found root cause and we had to change how we did things and fought for numerous DCRs for functionality that in our opinion should have been there based on what the product does and lost on most of them. An IBM guy was blunt honest with me once when I was trying to track down the official VMWARE support for all of their "fully supported" vmware products they were pushing... He said that all support is always best effort, you can not ever fully guarantee software or even hardware will do what you expect it to do, the vendor can always say, that is by design. That is why I have the honest no-nonsense warranty up on my website for my tools - http://www.joeware.net/win/free/warranty.htm joe -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Rick Kingslan Sent: Saturday, October 08, 2005 2:19 AM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] AD Restore Problem However, as we have discussed her MANY, MANY times - it might not be SUPPORTED. That simply means that PSS is only going to give best effort. They are NOT going to tell you: "Sorry - not supported." <click> If they do - let me know. I'll love taking that one to the brass. As we know - DCs work quite well virtualized today, thank you very much. Rick [msft, too] P.S. The 'not supported' thing goes for most anything that you can dream up. Believe me - PSS will try to solve nearly anything. They might laugh - but they will try. And, gladly take your $245.00, or whatever per incident is on your given current supported on not supported pain. -- Posting is provided "AS IS", and confers no rights or warranties ... -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Susan Bradley, CPA aka Ebitz - SBS Rocks [MVP] Sent: Thursday, October 06, 2005 9:15 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [ActiveDir] AD Restore Problem <stupid question alert> Okay so unless you are insane SBS.. images of your DCs are ixnay. What does Sun, Linux, Mac or any other competing Server OS do in their world to ensure the Kingdom easily and quickly comes back up? <yeah I know they don't have AD but they have to have some competing glue, right?> What have they done if anything? How to detect and recover from a USN rollback in Windows Server 2003: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=875495 That KB is interesting as it clearly indicates that having a DC in a Virtual Server environment is not supported... yet we SBSers have gotten word that once Exchange 2003 sp2 supports Vserver all of the parts of the 'standard' box will be supported in a virtual environment. Brett Shirley wrote: >If you have any replicas of those servers, when you restore those >VMWare images, you will have corrupted your forest during restore. > >-BrettSh [msft] > >This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no >rights. > > >On Thu, 6 Oct 2005, Carroll Frank USGR wrote: > > > >>I am working my way down the VMWare path also for my ultimate DR "ace >>in the hole". The environment is a TLD with 4 child domains. I am >>planning on running a single VMWare server that has virtual DCs for >>all 5 domains. I am going to peel off a dedicated site/vlan and put >>the physical VMWare server and all of the DC virt servers in that >>site. None of the virtual DCs are going to be GCs. The reason for the >>dedicated site is so I can keep people from using them for validation >>in production. >> >>Once I have them running, I plan to use the VM scripting to gracefully >>shut them down once a day and then shoot the image file of the >>shutdown DC off to tape, which then goes off-site. After the backup >>completes I then restart the virtual servers. >> >>This plays into the different hardware scenario since I can use VMWare >>to abstract the hardware. >> >>Of course, this whole process is the backup to the normal system state >>backup of all my backbone DCs. >> >>FWIW - Frank >> >>________________________________ >> >>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >>[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Coleman, >>Hunter >>Sent: Wednesday, October 05, 2005 5:37 PM >>To: [email protected] >>Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] AD Restore Problem >> >> >>You will still need to abandon the snapshot/image approach. Go to >>http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ and search >>for "usn rollback". You can get the same information by searching >>support.microsoft.com, but without the colorful and enlightening >>commentary that the list provides. >> >>Hunter >> >> >> > > List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/ List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/ List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/
