Free Range Apps Can Roam the Farm, Microsoft Says

Published: August 20, 2008

by Alex Woodie

Windows shops that want to move their virtualized applications among different physical servers in their server farm will be able to do so as often as they like with no licensing penalty starting next month, Microsoft announced yesterday. The changes are part of a revision in licensing policy that Microsoft hopes will boost the adoption of virtualization software--hopefully its recently introduced Hyper-V product--by eliminating the need for users of virtualized applications to pay twice for free-range privileges.

Beginning September 1, customers will be able to move any of 41 Microsoft server applications between servers within a server farm as often as necessary without paying additional licensing fees, Microsoft says.

Previously, an application had to reside on a server for at least 90 days before users could reassign the application's license to another server. For customers that wanted the freedom to move an application to different machines, that rule meant they had to buy two licenses, and they still would have faced restrictions on how often they moved the application.

With the new policy, Microsoft is waiving the 90-day rule, allowing customers to move specified applications to any machines as often as they wish--provided the applications reside within the same server farm.

And it gets better: Microsoft is providing a liberal interpretation of the term "server farm." According to Microsoft, there can be up to two data centers in a given server farm, and they can be geographically located up to four time zones apart. A given data center can only be part of one server farm at a time, but it can be reassigned once every 90 days. Try doing that with a chicken farm.

"Microsoft is knocking down barriers to virtualized deployments, which should help further accelerate the adoption rates," says IDC researcher Al Gillen.

While the change has been welcomed by partners and analysts, Microsoft's virtualization offerings are not yet entirely free range, and not without their barriers. For one, Hyper-V--the new hypervisor that just shipped last month--does not support live migration, or the capability to migrate virtual machines without bringing them offline. This is a feature offered by other virtualization products.

The new rule covers the most popular server products from Microsoft, with the exception of the Windows Server OS itself and its ERP products. The 41 applications set free include: SQL Server 2008 Enterprise edition; Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1) Standard and Enterprise editions; Dynamics CRM 4.0 Enterprise and Professional editions; Office SharePoint Server 2007; System Center; Office Communications Server 2007 Enterprise and Standard editions; and Search Server 2008. For the full list, download the "Application Server License Mobility" paper at www.microsoft.com/licensing/resources/volbrief.mspx.

Microsoft also changed its technical support policy for 31 server applications, enabling customers to get the same level of support for applications running on Hyper-V or other virtualization platforms as they get for running on the traditional, non-virtualized model.

The policy change covers Hyper-V as well as the virtualization products participating in the Server Virtualization Validation Program, which was announced in November and launched in June 2008. Vendors participating in that program (thus making their customers eligible for the new support program) include Cisco Systems, Citrix Systems (Xen), Virtual Iron, and Sun Microsystems.

Notably absent from the list is VMware, the EMC subsidiary that currently dominates the market for X64 virtualization software. That means Windows customers will be limited in the technical support they receive from Microsoft if they're running ESX Server or other virtualization products from VMware.

The change does help Linux customers, however--as long as they're SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) customers with Novell, which participates in Microsoft's Server Virtualization Validation Program. Customers that run Windows as a guest OS under a host SLES OS (a set up permitted under Xen), will be able to get all the Windows tech support they'd be entitled to if they were running a non-virtualized instance of Windows.

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