Licensing Hardware Virtualization for Servers

Licensing for Microsoft’s Hyper-V hardware virtualization products is relatively simple: Customers can acquire Hyper-V with Windows Server 2008 or as a stand-alone server product dedicated to hosting virtual machines (VMs) called Hyper-V Server 2008. However, more complexity faces organizations licensing the Windows Server OS and server applications (such as SQL Server) to run on hardware virtualization products. In general, organizations need to carefully select the Windows Server edition and version to license their VMs, and they should ensure that licenses for server applications (such as SQL Server) running in those VMs grant the rights needed for operations such as moving VMs among servers.

Besides licensing the tools used to provision, manage, and store VMs (discussed in the chapter “Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Supports Hyper-V“), three different components of virtualized systems must be licensed: the virtualization host, the OS running within each VM, and the server applications executing inside each VM.