Virtual licences for Server 2003 R2

[crobusa]

I just came from Microsoft's TechNet event in Illinois, and was thinking about what the presenter said.. . If you purchase Windows 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition, you can also run four virtual instances of the server software inside Virtual Server 2005 R2 for no additional cost

Yes they need to be "virtual machines", but the presenter said they could be any virtualization machine, MS, VMWare, etc...

So, I was thinking, it would be very cool if someone created a Linux distro devoted to acting as a Host OS, to a VM copy of Windows Server. This way a very small business could have a backup AD controller, a DFS system, and all the goodies for the cost of a single server license. You could even optimize the distro to cater to the free VMware.

 

[spyordie007]

Each software license allows you to run, at any one time, one instance of the server software in a physical OS environment and up to four instances of the server software in virtual OS environments on a particular server.

Server: A server is a physical hardware system capable of running server software. A hardware partition or blade is considered to be a separate physical hardware system, and therefore a separate server.

As I understand it you need to purchase Server 2003 R2 Enterprise and run the virtual engine on it to qualify; you cant run the virtual machines on another box.

Besides, it wouldnt be cost effective for a small business to purchase the Enterprise version.

 

[crobusa]

I'm really hoping to get a NFR copy of R2 Enterprise at one of the events. I have a copy of x86 Enterprise from an AMD event..
That 2nd quote might be gotten around with a server w/o hard-drive, like the use a cable to sell an OEM license. Still, such a config would loose the benfits of redundancy.

Thanks.

 

[spyordie007]

If the purpose of your query is redundancy and you are a volume license customer the best option would be a cold spare (than you can use *real* hardware):
http://download.microsoft.com/download/...b0-4cb8-8912-3b6ab966b8b2/dr_brief.doc
http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/resources/volbrief.mspx

The idea behind allowing you to run virtual servers is so that you can reduce the total number of servers required (i.e. if you run some older application that doesnt need the power of a full-physical server but needs its own windows install you could do it inside of a virtual machine).

That 2nd quote might be gotten around with a server w/o hard-drive, like the use a cable to sell an OEM license.

I dont know what you're going after here; the point is that if you want to run the additional "free" virtual server OSes they need to be running on the same hardware as your Server 2003 R2 Enterprise license.

 

[RebateMonger]

There's a lot of concern on the SBS groups that SBS R2 is going to be missing a LOT of the Standard Server 2003 R2 features. Like the site-to-site file synchronization. The "freebie" licenses will, doubtless, also be missing. Not that they'll do you much good, since you can only have one SBS Server in a Domain, anyway.

One of the things that's kewl about virtualization is how trivial it is to back up and restore to ANY hardware. You only need copy a single file. And you can move that file to ANY server, since the virtualizing software presents a standard "machine" to the server image. You could move a server from a machine with an Intel processor with SCSI RAID 5 array to a machine with an AMD processor with SATA RAID 1 array, and it wouldn't even know the difference.