W10 LTSB - a engineers cry for help!

Operating Systems & Open Source Windows
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UPDATE 27/2-2018.

Just had a meeting with Microsoft reps and techs about this and they could confirm a few things:

  • LTSB is rebranded LTSC (Long term service channel) for whatever reason…
  • Support will be 5+5 years instead of LTSBs 10. (The last 5 are extended life support, we assume the last 5 will be expensive).
  • However release cycle will be 2-4 years with a “fixed” time of 3 years. (… ? I guess you pay for 3 years, not sure how it fits the 5 year support cycle tho.)
  • Processors and upgrades are a thing, there will be NO support for older silicon. Note that support means no feature upgrades.
  • LTSC will build on feature upgrades, not feature-patches, and in-place upgrades only. (Not sure what this means, example was that a OS could be security patched but not have secure features since these are not updated with OS).

Only written reference we could get was this link

Hi systems engineer here!

The company I work for, metal industry, has read a Gartner report (from last year) that says W10 LTSB will die as the new releases are only supported by the latest silicon hardware and vice versa.

Since we got every OS from DOS up to now we did not care about this report when it was written.
Much has changed since then, now we got our standard W10 LTSB platform. I’ve spent too much time on developing that platform for Microsoft to just kill it.

This guy at MS forums sums up the problem.

“Windows 10 Long Term Servicing Branches, also known as LTSBs, will support the currently released silicon at the time of release of the LTSB," the new policy stated [emphasis added]. “As future silicon generations are released, support will be created through future Windows 10 LTSB releases that customers can deploy for those systems.”

“The problem, they explained, is that in the face of essentially annual silicon upgrades by Intel, enterprises would have to ditch the idea of sticking with a single LTSB build for, say, five years. Instead, they could be required to adopt virtually every LTSB version as they buy new PCs powered by new generations of silicon.”

“So, if I buy a machine today and put the current Windows 10 Ent LTSB on it…how long can I patch it via WSUS without having to install Feature Updates…3 years? How long can I use my current Windows 10 Ent LTSB ISO? Can’t I just keep it for however long I want and install it (and patch it) on machines that I get 2 and 3 years from now?”

I cannot find any more information about the future of LTSB or even if this actually means that we cannot patch older builds on new PCs and not run backups from old hardware to new replacements…

This issue is ranked critical by the higher-ups and I imagine we are not the only ones with this problem.
Are there anyone who got a firm understanding of this? MS promised 10 years support and now we are going to upgrade every year? sound too much even for MS!

@wendell got any inside info on this? or any tip on how we deal with this?

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tldr version of this.

It’s true. It’s not as dire as it seems. Grunt workstations and the like will be basically unaffected – they will bandaid the problem by doing something like disabling power management or disabling features of new silicon on old software.

Servers will be a different story and more complicated. Get ready for containerized services and virtualization everywhere. 2-3-5 year server life cycles again (remember pre-netburst days?) yes please.

LTSB will be permissive, but warn, unlike trying to run win7 on newer hardware that is mostly basically ok.

This is a symptom of device driver bitrot from within, btw. they need to totally overhaul how all that works to make it even more robust than it already is. linux levels of robustness.

I’m also available for virtualization consulting as that is what microsoft may force a lot of enterprises into – but not virtualization with hyperv hahahaha.

5 Likes
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When the levy breaks … momma you got to move. Windows is very generally functional. Generally, and that is kinda the point. Virtualization is your future … embrace it. Yes and NOT with HyperV because so so many reasons.

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Ty for your answer!

My immediate concern are the grunt-stations, but if it is possible to bypass this and get old backups in on the new hardware with some tinkering then we are going to be ok.

Server side we are already virtual and we are working on virtualization of as many grunt-stations as possible. Btw, could CubesOS be a future alternative for those physical machines we cannot viritualize due to network being… network? (remember what-now? my beard is not grey yet :wink: )

Request: could you talk more about device driver bitrot in a vid? that sounds like fun! Especially if I get to compare Winderps to Linux at work.

I would love to contract you but I doubt you would like to go to Sweden right now (yes metal industry is old-fashioned; you work for us, you work here! onsite) and viritualization is kinda the only thing we are actually up to speed with here hehe, VMware deployment growing each day!

@ropestretcher HyperV is still a thing?! really??! I might have gotten confy in my VMware bubble but last time (like 5 years ago) I checked hyperv was so bad we couldn’t even use it for testing.