First off, I’m not a MS licensing expert, don’t claim to be one, never did. For those that are: may the force be with you, your Jedi powers are much stronger than mine!
I was talking to a customer today who thought that Windows licensing in a virtualized world only applied when using Hyper-V and that this licensing did not apply when running VMware’s ESX – not true . I’m a documentation freak and this post is for my readers to have the links to find information on this topic – which comes up often.
Let’s start with my myth above. The answer is that Windows licensing when running virtualized applies to any virtualization platform:
A.
Yes. The use rights apply regardless of the virtualization product being used.
You can find the complete FAQ here .
The basic idea to quantify running Windows Virtualized is that Standard Edition let’s you run 1 VM on a host, Enterprise gives you 4 VM’s on a host and datacenter gives you unlimited VMs on that host. Microsoft has a great online calculator to help you understand which licensing method is most cost effective for the number of CPU’s you have and number of VMs you plan on running on each host. You can find their calculator here .
Lastly, if you have to document everything for management and you want a very detailed paper on their Licensing, or you are battling insomnia at night, have a read at this whitepaper titled: Licensing Microsoft Server Products in Virtual Environments, August 2008
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