Microsoft Technology Summit is an annual Microsoft event held in Warsaw which this year attracted >2,500 IT Professionals and Developers. I was honoured to present two sessions in the Architecture track;
The DSI presentation was an updated version of the session I delivered several times earlier this year. Its been changed to reflect the fact that SDM has been renamed SML and has broad industry support.
The Virtualisation session was an overview of Microsoft's current technologies in this space (Virtual Server/PC, Terminal Services and SoftGrid). Both sessions had nearly full rooms and generated a lot of questions at the end. Application virtualisation had the most questions, two of which I couldn't answer on the day - so I promised to paste the questions and answers on the blog;
Q1) One Win2K3 Enterprise Edition license entitles you to run 4 guest copies of Win2K3 on the Enterprise Edition host. How does licensing work when you have an Active/Active Virtual Server cluster - do you get 8 licenses which can run on one machine in a failure situation?
A1) No, the licenses are tied to a physical machine. To run and Active/Active cluster with a total of 8 VMs, you'd need to buy an additional 4 licenses of Win2K3 Enterprise Edition or chose to use Win2K3 Data Center edition which allows an unlimited number of VMs. See this whitepaper which clarifies licensing with Virtualisation. This web page has additional information, including an FAQ.
Note: in the presentation I stated that Microsoft Licensing for our server applications needs to catch up with the OS licensing in terms of Virtualisation; the whitepaper shows this has already happened - for example a license for Exchange allows you to have multiple virtual Exchange machines on the physical host, but only 1 can run at any one time. See the whitepaper for all the details.
Q2) How do customers purchase / obtain SoftGrid?
A2) If you're a Microsoft Software Assurance or Enterprise Agreement customer, contact your account team. Other customers will be able to buy SoftGrid through the Microsoft Partner / reseller channel from January 1 2007. I'll update this post later on how you could buy/try SoftGrid before January 1.
