Vista Enterprise Options Reduced

Recent tweaks to licensing rules governing Vista Enterprise Edition will significantly curtail customers’ choices to host virtual machines on blade PCs, as well as when swapping Vista Enterprise for Vista Ultimate, which some customers have done in order to get DVD-viewing codecs that are not included in Vista Enterprise. The changes reduce the utility of Vista Enterprise and complicate Vista licensing, although the number of affected customers today is relatively small.

Getting the Blade

Blade PCs are system boards, with processors, memory, network adapters, and sometimes storage, that can be slotted into backplanes, permitting a dozen or more PCs to occupy the space of a standard desktop PC. The backplanes are typically installed in a rack in a datacenter, where they can be easily managed, reducing the likelihood that IT staff will need to go to users’ desks to fix hardware problems. Users connect to the blades with a remote desktop protocol, from either a standard PC or a thin terminal.