There’s a new SKU in the July price list for SPLA (Service Providers Leasing Agreement – AKA hosting licensing) called DataCenter Per Processor Outsourcer.
One of the perks for retail/volume licensing (non-hosted) was that you could by DataCenter edition for each of your hosts physical processors. That gives you unlimited free Windows Server licensing for VM’s running on that host. That’s a major money saver on hosts with lots of VM’s.
In SPLA up to now, we only had a SKU for anonymous DataCenter. This only allows anonymous free licensing for VM’s. Anonymous means that Windows can play no role in authenticating the users, e.g. SharePoint, Exchange, Active Directory, etc. You cannot run authenticated (those where Windows plays a role in user authentication) licenses on VM’s on this host, even if you pay for them! This meant that you either:
- Ran 2 Hyper-V clusters: 1 using Enterprise for authenticated and one running DataCenter for anonymous in larger installations. This doubled your hardware costs.
- Or just run 1 Hyper-V cluster: running Enterprise where you didn’t get the benefits for anonymous licensing. This put smaller companies at a pricing disadvantage to larger companies. It was also pretty expensive compared to the new model.
The new Outsourcer SKU’s replace the authenticated licensing model. It also adds DataCenter to the list, fixing a major flaw with SPLA licensing for hosting companies using Hyper-V for virtualisation. There is also a new 3 year license which saves a bit of money over the per month model.
EDIT #1:
Our SPLA LAR called me up to ask a technical question. Then he warned me not to go making plans on the Outsourcer SKU. He’s seen an issue in the text that MS needs to rectify immediately before the July price list takes effect. Hopefully it will be sorted out soon.