Microsoft volume licencing questions.

Factual Questions
1

Hi.
I’ve tried to google this, but the following scenarios are all that I’m presented with…
[ul]
[li]Someone asks the quesiton on a forum, someone else says “I found this link incredibly useful”, and the link goes to a dead page (article not found)[/li]
[li]Someone asks the question on a stack exchange site and gets his head bitten off (lately those sites are full of eliteist assholes) for not checking the existing question page all about licencing (which doesn’t actually answer the specific question)[/li]
[li]You google it, and end up on a microsoft site, which gives you a hundred million lines of obscure waffle and a crowded tree-structure of branch links that will actually melt your brain before you get to the one sentence that answers your question.[/li]
[/ul]

So… I thought of the dope where, as I remember it, there are experts in almost everything.

We are basically undergoing a process of transfering a physical server infrastructure into a virtual environment. Most of the servers have volume licences of Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 (and some 2003)

We want to be able to ‘build’ the virtual environment before we decomission the physical (to avoid downtime)

I know that data center licences are ridonculously expensive and it would be wasteful to not use the individual volume licences we own.

So, quesiton 1. Can we activate virtual servers using our volume licences before we uninstall the physical equivalents for some kind of grace period?

Question 2 - If we do purchase data center licences, one per physical server, are virtual machines then tied to the server they were created on? In other words, we have a virtual machine (located on a SAN) running on one physical server 1. Physical server 1 explodes. We migrate the vm to physical server 2 (note, it hasn’t moved to another file system, it’s on a SAN) does the original licence applied to the OS on that VM still apply?

2

I can help out a little bit here… at least from my own personal knowledge this is how I would interpret things:

First, I know you said most were volume licenses, the question is for the ones that aren’t, did you purchase the licenses separately or were they purchased through a OEM? If the license is an OEM license you CANNOT transfer it to another machine. This is more prevalent on workstations but I would verify that the non-volume licenses are NOT OEM licenses.

I have not seen a hard rule on transfer and leaving the previous up for a period of time, but one way around this I believe is to simply not input the License Key on the new servers, use the grace period allowed by Microsoft, before the grace period ends, shutdown the old server and transfer the license. (If you can’t migrate the server within the grace period then I would argue that you need an additional license even if you eventually intend on shutting down the server).

On to the Datacenter license, if you purchase the datacenter license, you can install an unlimited number of Windows OSes on that server (at or below that current version of Datacenter - higher if you have software assurance)
SO if you have two VM hosts and one crashes, the other host’s datacenter license would cover the migrated VMs.

Licensing with Microsoft is very confusing, sometimes it is best just to call their licensing department to get clarification!

3

As EricGreenDCFC mentioned, if you purchased OEM licenses, then they are tied to the hardware on which you originally installed them.

If you have any sort of Volume Licensing Agreement with Microsoft and purchased your Windows Server licences under that agreement, then you have some flexibility.

From thisMicrosoft Volume Licensing Brief:

“For Volume Licensing (VL) Windows Server licenses, you can reassign the software licenses from one server to
another, but not more often than every 90 days. There are some exceptions to this rule outlined in the Product Use
Rights document. For example, you may reassign the license earlier than 90 days if you must retire the licensed server
due to permanent hardware failure.”

Later it goes on to say:

“This, however, does not restrict the dynamic movement of virtual OSEs
between licensed servers. As long as the servers are licensed and each server individually does not run more instances
than the number for which it is licensed, you are free to use VMware vMotion and System Center Virtual Machine
Manager to move virtualized instances between licensed servers at will.”

So basically, you need enough Windows Server licenses to cover all of your Virtual Servers. An important caveat here is that with Windows Standard or Enterprise, even though you can transfer a licensed VM from one host to another, you mus have a license for that VM on each host.

So if you have two hosts and a total of 10 VMs, you only need 10 Server licenses in ‘normal circumstances’, with 5 assigned to each host. But if you wanted to do maintenance on one host, you couldn’t VMotion those 5 VMs to the other host, because it has only 5 licenses. You would need to purchase a total of 20 Server licenses in order to fully cover yourself.

You don’t say what size your environment is, but it may make sense for you to move to Windows Datacenter. With Datacenter, you license each physical processor on each host, and then you have rights to run an unillited number of VMs, and never need to worry about Windows Server licensing again.

4

In answer to question 1, Yes. Each standard license allows 1 virtual instance of the OSE, in addition to the physical server.

Here’s the relevant text from the PUR brief for server 2008:
3. For Standard licenses, you may use one Running Instance of server software in the Physical OSE and, for each license assigned, one Running Instance in up to two Virtual OSEs on the Licensed Server.
4. For Standard licenses, if all permitted Virtual OSE Instances are used, you may use the Instance in the Physical OSE only to host and manage the Virtual OSEs.

Handy references:
server 2008 specific use rights: http://www.microsoftvolumelicensing.com/userights/DocumentSearch.aspx?Mode=3&DocumentTypeId=1

Microsoft volume licensing reference page: http://www.microsoftvolumelicensing.com/
(This site takes you straight to the relevant license documents for the selected product, no faq, hot questions or other useless junk.)

5

Thanks guys. Sorry to have not replied for a while. I forgot I posted this. (I don’t visit the SDMB very often these days)

We eventually decided to buy two data center licences (Most are one licence per CPU but our reseller sold us a licence that covers two cpus)

But it looks like they sold us the wrong typ (system builder/oem). I tried to activate a 2008 r2 vm with the virtual key and it told me that it was the wrong version of windows.

To give you a bit more info: We have two hosts running vmware esxi (so the hosts themselves won’t have a windows OS installed. I believe Microsoft do accommodate this scenario in their licencing terms.

One thing I have seen on the internet when trying to research this is - “Ask your reseller, they should know this stuff” but it is becoming apparent that the particular reseller we are using doesn’t know their stuff.
I don’t suppose you know how I can find out the UK number for Microsoft’s Licencing dept?

6

Nevermind, found some phone numbers. Didn’t think it would be relatively easy to find.