* Microsoft's new licensing guidelines
When I was writing last week’s newsletters about Windows upgrades and licensing, it occurred to me that as it was already October there should be new licensing guidelines coming out of Redmond. Sure enough, while you were reading about the licensing maze, Microsoft was announcing new licensing policies, specifically licensing for virtualized services.
Many people run virtual servers – multiple instances of operating systems (or multiple operating systems) running on a single hardware device. While Microsoft is just entering the virtualization world, other companies (notably VMware), have been there for many years. Virtualization allows for many benefits not the least of which is a way to dramatically lower hardware costs. One server-class box, one keyboard, one monitor, one motherboard, etc. – virtual machines minimize the hardware investment. While you should increase the amount of RAM and disk available to the processor(s), it’s a lot cheaper than setting up multiple boxes.
One of the big drawbacks to virtualization has been Microsoft’s licensing policies which (up until now) have assumed that each product is running on its own hardware and is always available. You could, for example, use a box with four CPUs and virtualize it into four instances, each with its own CPU. But run SQLServer in one of the instances and you’ll need a 4-CPU license because of the physical hardware. That’s been changed. The new licensing will be by instance.
Network managers would always to have spares ready to run as part of a disaster recovery plan. Under previous licensing, each installation of a Windows server needed its own licenses, whether it was running or not. The new plan allows you to install multiple instances but only carry licenses for the number of concurrently running ones. For example, you could configure SQLServer to run in one instance of a virtual machine then install the same license on another hardware device (configured to also run as a virtualized server). If the first instance becomes unavailable, you can start up the second and continue computing – all with just one set of licenses. Of course, you’ll need to configure the database files to be on a shared storage device and also employ some clustering techniques to quickly change client systems to access the new server but that’s a small price to pay for the savings in server license fees.
There’s more to Microsoft’s virtualization strategy, and more licensing changes that coincide with that strategy. Head over to the Microsoft press release to read all about it.
