Microsoft has updated the Product Usage Rights documents for Hyper-V for internal or volume/OEM licenses. Chris Wolf has a post that discusses the changes. Here’s the high/low lights:
- If you run Windows 2003 guests on a Windows 2008 Hyper-V host server and that host is your only W2008 machine (and offering no other services) then you no longer need W2008 CAL’s. This is a good thing. Prior to this update you would have needed W2008 CAL’s, strictly speaking.
- Server OS licenses can only be moved between clustered hosts once every 90 days unless there is adequate licensing for the guest OS on all hosts. This is a bad, VERY bad thing.
The server OS requirement is plain silly. It’s trying to steer people towards buying Windows 2008 Data Center edition. DC edition for a host is a perfect solution for anyone using more than 4 guests on a 2 node cluster (more than 8 on a 3 node, etc) using volume licenses. Why? Because you get unlimited free server OS licenses for guests. Your Data Center Edition licenses covers all of the server OS license requirements for all of your guests.
But this stinks for anyone not in that scenario. What about VMware ESX? What about SPLA (hosting license scheme from MS). SPLA virtualisation licensing was written by a neanderthal with no grip on reality. We’re stuck with DC edition only being available for unauthenticated (no CAL scenario) implementations. Some eejit decided that it would be illegal to run authenticated guest OS’s on an unauthenticated host even if you paid for the guest OS!
So what’s going to happen? Quite simply people are going to flick a middle finger at the PUR like they’ve been doing for years and license how they see fit. They’ll license their guest OS and CAL’s, move VM’s around as necessary and place them on whatever hosts they have to. Making up rules for the sake of complicating things is now warranted and the sooner MS’s licensing monkeys see this, the better.
This is in no way a criticism of the MS products. I like them. I’ve chosen to use them because of their current performance/managability and because of where MS is taking them in the near future. But the licensing managers in MS need to be taken outside and put down like "ol’ yeller" by Microsoft’s executives.