Quick Take: Licensing Benefits of Virtualization

For some, the real licensing benefit of virtualization is a hidden entity. This is aided by some rather nebulous language in end user licenses from Microsoft and others.

Steve Kaplan, over at DABCC, has a brief and informative article on how licensing affects the deployment costs of virualized Microsoft products - sometimes offsetting the cost of the hypervisor costs in a VMware environment, for instance.

SOLORI's 1st take: the virtual data center has new ways to increase costs with equal or better offsets to speed ROI - especially where new initiatives are concerned. When in doubt, talk to your software vendor and press for clear information about implementation licensing costs.

SOLORI's 2nd take: Steve's report relies on Gartner's evaluation which is based on Microsoft policies that are outdated. For instance, Server 2003 R2 is NOT "the only edition that will allow the customer to run one instance in a physical operating system (OS) environment and up to four instances in virtual OS environments for one license fee." This also applies to Server 2008... (see Microsoft links).


Check out Steve's evaluation here. Also, see Microsoft's updated policy here and their current Server 2003 policies here.