Microsoft Eases Up on Licensing Requirements for Virtualization

Microsoft has started to make it a little bit easier for customers to move applications they’re using within a server farm.

Microsoft is updating its software licensing terms for 41 server applications, including Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise edition, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 Standard and Enterprise editions, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Enterprise and Professional editions, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, and Microsoft System Center products. With the new terms, the company is waiving its previous 90-day reassignment rule, allowing customers to reassign licenses from one server to another within a server farm as frequently as needed. For many customers, the change will reduce the number of licenses they need to support their IT systems, increase agility, and simplify the tracking of application instances or processors because customers now can count licenses by server farm instead of by server.

This isn’t something I’ve run into much personally, but the scale of clients and operations that I’m involved with hasn’t required us to use server farms or be available for this type and size of operation.

One thing I have always wondered though is when we’re using various pieces of software in order to test how applications will run for clients, it seemed to be a real pain when there was a need to wipe a system and do a clean install of software.

As you can imagine, testing and redeveloping could have you installing, breaking and repairing applications fairly regularly. Having to bang your head against the wall trying to work through licensing issues.

Hopefully this step by Microsoft will really make this a non-issue with 41 of their most frequently used server applications.

Source: New Microsoft Licensing and Support Eases Path to Virtualization