Additional subscription for Windows 2025: Hotpatch service

[Kitkatninja]

Hi All,

 

So it sounds like MS will be introducing an additional subscription for your server OS from 2025, the hotpatch service.

 

Quote

Well, first things first, to be able to run the no-reboot hotpatch security updates feature, Microsoft said that you will need to be using “Windows Server 2025 Standard or Datacenter, and your server must be connected to Azure Arc.” The important and controversial bit quickly followed: “You will also need to subscribe to the Hotpatch service.”

 

While I haven't yet read anything for the Education sector, it does seem like it's going to be $1.50 per CPU core per month.

 

You can read the whole article on Forbes here.  But if anyone else has any further information, please add it.

 

-Ken

[Dos_Box]

I can see businesses that run critical services paying out for it, but that could get expensive for schools who can afford to reboot servers every few weeks.
I do have to ask how many cores are now common in school servers.

[PotNoodleTech]

Most schools are gonna have at least 48 cores total - many more like 148 so that's quite an extra monthly cost.  You may decide it's worth it!

[Cat_Jam148]

Could get costly for larger estates, and can see the benefit for businesses.

 

Not something that we'd be looking at here. We've managed with a monthly update & restart since Windows Update has existed, and can continue to do so.

Edited April 30, 2025 by Cat_Jam148

[Fazza]

I wonder if it will be included as part of a licensing subscription and only paid for separately if a business etc. has purchased an OEM license or such like?

[psydii]

That's not too bad. Certainly pretty affordable if you need it,  but as others have said do schools need it? I don't think anyone has been inconvenienced by a server monthly update  for years now.  The more disruptive things were always SQL Server, Exchange or 3rd part services, where manual intervention is needed  thus resulting business hours maintenance windows, (for those of us who didn't have managing updates outside of business hours in their contract)... but with almost everything being SAAS, there's almost nothing left of on-prem beyond core windows network infrastructure.

[Fazza]

1 hour ago, psydii said:

That's not too bad. Certainly pretty affordable if you need it

 

Wish we had your budget then! 😉 One of our Hypervisors has two 36 core CPUs so that's ((72x1.5)x12) - a whopping £1,296 a year for updates that don't require a reboot!  It's not what I would call affordable  and that's just one of our servers...

[psydii]

If you are running a service that has  72 cores x3, at its heart, I'd say that ought to be  affordable within the orgs entire budget, even if it looks a lot compared to the nominal "IT Budget".  But is it value for money? Imagine a world where on prem MIS was still king, and in that world lessons were delivered 24/7.  MIS downtime (even scheduled) interrupts delivery of the core service, requiring potentially a hundred people to have to  create an hours worth of  backlog of admin tasks which they need to catch up, that's 100 people salary  x1 hr(of lost productivity).  It probably exceeds the annual cost of the  of  the hotpatch licence in the first month alone.  Thus the hot patch licence is affordable when considering potential lost productivity, and time freed up,  and any head teacher  or school business manager should be able to see the value.

 

Now obviously all the conditionals on that scenario are not in fact true in the real world, and actually the line of business app needs patching fairly often too, so does that make it value for money now? No, probably not. Even if one did have spare cash in the IT Budget to be able to pay for it, there are probably other things that might have a higher return on investment.

 

But consider that even a large secondary school can run fine on two hyper-v hosts with 72 cores (we've had occasion where we've ended up with everything running on a single host with way fewer cores than that, and nobody noticed for quite a while!) in the future  when spec'ing out the hyper-v cluster's replacement you might consider the cost of the third host vs the cost/benefit of the hotpatch licence. Its been a while since I costed up servers so really no idea how the maths would turn out, but maybe?

 

 

[KK20]

not really, we buy servers that fit to budget. Our R750 were cheaper than R650 at the time and had a "deal" on the CPUs giving us more cores than we needed.  Licensing DC didnt make much of a difference with the 16 packs still working out.  Same as you, I budgeted a "normal" workload on 20 cores.   We run a 2 node hyperconverged so can easily run on one node and I am happy to patch during the day using CAU with no loss of service.  Looking forwards, MIS is cloud, 80% of storage is cloud; we still run a small onsite "documents" for our PE, drama, Art, DT as the video editing portion does not play well with onedrive.  But this is changing now I am running ipads for 50% students, these work much better with video so as soon as I have that cracked I can get rid of all-but-office staff desktops.