vmware server licensing tip

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Hi all, Came across a little tip over the weekend, im sure most of you know it but I thought I'd post it here anyway.

For those of you who purchase software licenses for your company and have some kind of virtualized infrastructure its worth considering purchasing server 2008 enterprise edition when you want a new server license. This is because the enterprise version allows you to run 4 guest OS's (any server version from NT4 upwards) on any Host OS. So whilst this is predominately aimed at using 2008 hypervisor to runs guest OS's if you have VMware or Citrix virtualization you could use the license for that as well.

Now at present where I purchase licenses from where we would normally purchase the server STD editions if we buy enterprise versions we would be saving approx 300 quid which is nearly buy 3 get 1 free.

 

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I seem to recall that Microsoft are skating the fine line between customer incentives and illegal anti-competition practices. If you read their agreement you'll see that they are only offering these benefits to those using Microsoft Virtual Server.

They even offer unlimited instances of Windows 2003 STD, Windows 2003 Enterprise, and Windows 2003 Data Centre Edition if you purchase a copy of Data Centre Edition (as many instances as you can fit on a single physical box).

 

really, have you got a good link for the info, our licensing company and a blog i found seem to say it doesnt matter what virtualization platform you use.

http://blogs.technet.com/mattmcspir...-windows-server-in-a-virtual-environment.aspx

 

I thought the same as you Dales. We purchased datacenter 2008 to use with ESX......

 

It does not matter which platform you use
and Datacenter provides unlimited virtualization rights
so its worth checking the break even points between enterprise and datacenter

its not a big leap, remember Datacenter is CHEAPER than enterprise, but is licensed per processor, so a 2 processor box is cheaper than buying two enterprise licenses, which would of given you licenses for the two enterprise editions + 4 virtual instances each for a total of 10
if you can get more than 10 boxes on a system, DC is the way to go (provided its green field and you dont have a ton of existing licenses)

 

Sorry guys, could have sworn I read that Microsoft was using licensing to give itself a boost in the virtualisation stakes. I remembered reading about Data Centre Edition and thinking that was a sweet deal.

 

They provide a similar licencing model for some of their system center management products

one base license (around $1500 i believe) gives you useage for SCCM, SCOM, SCVMM and one or two others I think, and if applied to a virtual server host allows you to use the software for every virtual machine, very nice deal!

 

Thanks for advice Phoenix, I had not even thought about datacenter ed, just discounted it imediately as probably too expensive.

 

it depends how you look at it
it has a CHEAPER list price than ENT
but its per processor not per server
so that can come into play
but lets be fair, a Dual Quad core system can run a lot more than 10 VMs on most days
;)