Yeah … MS licensing is nuts. There’s no getting around it. They must have way too many lawyers on staff. Nothing is simple and often you find things are contradictory.
If you are a normal consumer of licenses then you should regularly download and review the Product Usage Rights (PUR) document. It explains everything about how you need to license your products and how you can use them.
If you are a service provider such as a hosting or SAAS company then you should download and review the Service Provider Usage Rights (SPUR) document on a regular basis. Here’s the reason why. Under MS’s licensing terms, the only way to provide these sorts of services is via a SPLA agreement. This is where you lease MS licenses every month. This scheme is very complicated and I’m pretty sure some hosting companies are using the scheme illegally. There’s 3 types of license in SPLA:
- SAL: This is where you license a server product (Windows, SQL, System Center, etc) by the number of users using the product. You don’t have to purchase a license for the server product with this scheme. It’s great if you have a known, fixed and small number of clients – not concurrent but potential!
- Unauthenticated Server: This is for something like a dumb web server with static content. Windows plays absolutely no role in authenticating any users of the service provided by the server. This is per CPU. At the moment, this is available for Web and Data Center editions only and it’s quite cheap. That’s a clue as to the purpose of this operating system.
- Authenticated Server: This is a per CPU license for any server where Windows does play a role in authenticating the user, e.g. Active Directory, Terminal Services, etc. This SKU is very expensive compared to the unauthenticated server license. This is because you do not need to purchase CAL’s. You can support an unlimited number of clients. For any hosting company, it is critical that your sales people get to know how your customer is authenticating their users before you give and quotes or sign any contracts; this means getting the techies talking to each other – contrary to the processes of some companies I’ve encountered.
SPLA lets a hosting company purchase 50% of the number of leased-to-customer licenses for internal usage. Great – but do you really want to spend hundreds per month per CPU on a Windows Server when you can purchase one for 3 times that monthly lease price? You probably already have the CAL’s. Sometimes it’s a cost saver but not always.
In these documents you’ll find all the licensing nastiness associated with VDI/VECD, virtualisation, CAL’s and all that fun stuff.
Have a read, have a weep and then get legal. Breaking the conditions of PUR or SPUR can get your directors thrown in prison.