Products That Provide License Mobility Through Software Assurance

[This report was edited after initial publication. See notes in italics below.]

When covered with Software Assurance (SA), most Microsoft server licenses can be reassigned to cover workloads hosted by a third-party service provider on multitenant servers. Called License Mobility through Software Assurance (SA), this use right is, not surprisingly, contingent on maintaining continuous SA coverage on the underlying licenses [including all associated Client Access Licenses (CALs)]. This chart lists the major license types offering License Mobility through SA, organized by licensing model. It also compares the virtualization rights conferred by the licenses under on-premises and hosted scenarios, which can in some cases differ substantially. Specifically, the number of discrete operating system environments (OSEs) covered by a single license can vary. (An OSE refers to an OS instance running on either a physical or virtual server; in the context of this discussion, OSE is usually synonymous with a virtual machine that is loaded into memory and executing.)