.NET Processor License Upgrades Clarified

Companies that have Enterprise Agreements (EAs) or Upgrade Advantage (UA) licenses for SNA Server, Site Server Commerce Edition, and Proxy Server can upgrade to per-processor licenses of the corresponding .NET Enterprise Server, Microsoft has announced.

The upgrade policy enables customers who licensed these products on a per-server basis to upgrade to the .NET Enterprise versions, many of which are available only in per-processor versions. The applicable .NET Enterprise Servers are Host Integration Server (previously SNA Server); Internet Security and Acceleration Server (previously Proxy Server); and Commerce Server 2000 (previously Site Server Commerce Edition).

SNA Server and Site Server were licensed as server software and associated Client Access Licenses (CALs), and Proxy Server as server software alone, with no CALs required. These earlier products could run on multiple processor machines at no additional cost (Windows NT supported up to eight processors). However, per-processor licensing means that a customer who ran a single copy of SNA Server on a two-processor machine needs to purchase two per-processor upgrades if they want to run Host Integration Server on the same box. The new policy, which allows companies to obtain up to four per-processor licenses for each copy of the original product, is meant to alleviate the cost of such upgrades.