Microsoft announced today that it will eliminate its licensing restrictions that prevented customers from being able to move its virtual applications to a different virtual server more than once every 90 days. This is important as the world moves closer and closer to being hardware agnostic. Prior to today, it was technically neccessary for administrators to re-assign licensing when a virtual machine swapped hardware.
The new licensing goes into effect on September 1st for many of Microsoft’s server products (41 in all). So, what’s missing? SQL Server 2005/2008 standard edition tops the list. This is where Microsoft starts to play some hard ball. They are urging people to pay for Enterprise licensing on such products if they want the flexability offered by current virtual technologies. Furthermore, Microsoft announced new support policies for running products (31 specific applications) on Virtual platforms. By Virtual platforms, I mean Hyper-V. VMware and others are notably excluded from the added benefits of these support statements.
Microsoft has offered the same support for any hypervisor that goes through their new Server Virtualization Validation Program. Cisco, Citrix, Novell, and Sun are reportedly curently going through this process. VMware has thus far elected not to participate in the new program.
Important note: Windows Server as OS is also EXCLUDED from this policy change. So you still have to license for each ESX host you are going to vmotion to.
VMware is already signed up for the SVVP program. The website just doesn’t show it yet. Hoping for an official statement from VMware today.
Nice catch - I didn’t notice that on my first pass through the new Virtualization Licensing whitepaper. I guess this just makes a stronger case for High Density Virtual Servers with Datacenter licensing.
Nice scoop on the SVVP too. I had checked the website last night, and they weren’t listed, today they are.