Rumors about changes in Microsoft Licensing

TalkBack 1 of 10:

Next »

• Thread View
• Flat View

Why does the hardware matter?

VMWare and Citrix have developed a lot of wonderful GUI tools around moving virtual machines. While these tools seem to exist solely to fix problems that exist with Windows servers, they do work for their intended application.

However, since it is inherently obvious that the best way to "save" a crashed or hung Windows VM is to simply spin it up somewhere else, or to move a VM from a host that is overloaded to one that is less used, this certainly presents an issue for an OS company that wants to bind their software to specific hardware.

It would definitely behoove Microsoft to remove all together the requirement that one copy of Windows correlate to one piece of hardware. However, should they maintain this licensing policy, two things could inevitably happen:

1) Organizations who heavily leverage VMWare and Citrix technology to deal with the handicaps of Windows servers by moving virtual machines will need to buy one copy of Windows for each host server in the pool for which VMs will be moved around.

2) Organizations that can move from Windows to Linux will do so and not only save on the new higher cost of running Windows but be able to eventually move from VMWare and Citrix to the built-in virtualization tools that exist in the Linux community.

Posted by: ErikJacobs   Posted on: 08/15/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

Alert moderator to an offensive message

Subscribe to this discussion via Email or RSS

SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads

• Email Security and Archiving - Clearer in the Cloud Google The time is NOW for businesses and organizations of all sizes to implement ... Download Now
• Virtualization: Architectural Considerations And Other Evaluation Criteria VMware Of the many approaches to x86 systems virtualization available in the ... Download Now
• The Impact of Virtualization Software on Operating Environments VMware Today's use of virtualization technology allows IT professionals to ... Download Now