New, Flexible Virtual Machine Licensing anticipated from Microsoft next week
August 14th, 2008 | 
Author: Networkworld.com article Microsoft to unveil new licensing policies for virtual machines by John Brodkin indicates that Microsoft will unveil new licensing policies for Windows operating systems running on virtual machines (VMs) as early as next Tuesday August 19. Microsoft’s view that the Windows operating system is anchored to the physical hardware it runs on may finally be changing as virtualization becomes more and more mainstream.
According to the article, Microsoft’s current licensing policy is in violation when a Windows VM is transferred between different virtualization hosts.
With one of the main advantages of migrating to virtual infrastructure being the mobility of VMs, this policy is definitely not in sync with how virtual administrators around the globe manage virtual Windows servers today. VMs are constantly moving between physical hosts daily, and done so both manually and automatically. John explains this further:
“Microsoft considers a VMotion move a license transfer, and prevents customers from making such a transfer more than once every
90 days.“You may reassign a software license, but not on a short-term basis
(i.e., not within 90 days of the last assignment),” Microsoft says in a
licensing policy document for Windows Server 2003.
John then refers to an interview with Chris Wolf who speculates that Microsoft is about to change their policy and remove the physical hardware dependency restrictions. It is believed that the new policy will lift the 90 day VM migration limitation and therefore finally tie the server operating system license to the VM’s virtual hardware. No mention of a similar policy change for Windows XP or Vista VMs is made, however.
Hopefully, next Tuesday will be positively remembered as “Policy Tuesday” as opposed the patch Tuesdays Microsoft users have become used to.
Read all of the Networkworld.com article at the link above.
I want to thank VM /ETC reader Joe Suma for sending me a heads up on this article and exciting news.
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