I’ve just read about some licensing changes for the SMSE CAL. This CAL entitles you to license a physical device (and hence all the VM’s on it) for the following System Center products:
- Operations Manager
- Configuration Manager
- Data Protection Manager
- Virtual Machine Manager
You’re probably aware that VMM 2008 is in beta at the moment. The System Center team blog says that it will be released in Q4 2008. Along with this it will be included to replace VMM 2007 in the SMSE. VMM 2008 will also be available as a standalone product. It can make sense to use the SMSE because it works out around the price of the CAL’s for two of these products. VMM and SCOM can work very closely together offering an almost consultancy/advisor like experience for MS virtualisation (Virtual Server and Hyper-V).
It is expected that the cost of the SMSE will increase by 10-15% at this time.
Credit: Bink.