One of the frustrations of moving to a virtual environment from a purely physical one is dealing with the issue of licenses, both for operating system products and for applications. Many software license agreements were written in a simpler time, when OS and application products could only run on physical machines. (Heck, even that could get complicated – look at all the nonsense associated with OEM licenses for products like Windows XP.)
Nowadays, in a VM environment, an operating system might be running on a physical machine – but it might also be running in a VM. Microsoft’s position (as I understand it) has been that any OS running in a VM must be licensed. For example, with Server 2008 Enterprise, you can run the operating system in as many as four virtual machines per physical processor. In the newer product, Hyper-V Server 2008, you don’t get any OS licenses, so any OS running in a VM must have its own license. But can it be an unused virtual machine license “left over” from a physical installation of Server 2008 Enterprise? Apparently not, but that doesn’t seem quite fair.
The situation gets murkier when you look at the per-processor licensing of applications, especially when you consider that the mapping between physical and virtual processors may not be a static one. I started thinking about this when reading about the dynamic resource reallocation features of the new Virtual Machine Manager 2008 product. Are we going to be violating license agreements when we start reallocating CPUs in our VMs? I think we can all look forward to paying the lawyers even more money than we already are in order to figure out whether we’re completely street-legal in complex VM deployments. The software industry needs to clarify its licensing models – and sooner rather than later.
Recent posts
