90 day reassignment rule waived for server applications

What’s happening?

We’re giving customers greater flexibility by removing the need to wait 90 days to reassign a server application licence. This means they can move server applications between servers in a server farm* as often as they want without paying any extra licensing fees. This change affects 41 of our products.

We will also be offering extended support, including for third party virtualisation solutions, across 31 of our server application products.

When?

This comes into effect on September 1 2008.

Why?

We’ve been listening to our customers and partners, who’ve been asking for this change. We are evolving our licensing rules in response to their feedback and to keep pace with rapid innovation in (and adoption of) virtualisation technologies. Waiving the 90 day reassignment rule means customers can set up far more dynamic, agile IT infrastructures that make the most of the flexibility that virtualisation offers.

On top of this, our customers will now get the same level of support in a virtualised environment that they are used to in a non-virtualised environment.

And of course, changing the rules in this way helps us to drive adoption of our virtualisation solutions.

Which products are covered?

This change only applies to licences bought through a Volume Licensing agreement. However, customers don’t need to have Software Assurance to take advantage of the new rules. All servers that are licensed under the Server/CAL model come under this waiver. Examples of products covered include:

  • SQL Server 2008 (Server + CAL and Per Processor)
  • Exchange Server 2007
  • Office SharePoint Server 2007
  • External connector licences

Please note that Windows Server 2008 is not in the scope of these changes.

To ensure you're up to speed on this very important development, you can read more here

Download the Volume Licensing brief  (from the virtualisation section)

Read the press announcement

* Microsoft’s definition of a server farm has changed to: A server farm consists of up to two data centres each physically located in a time zone that is within 4 hours of the local time zone of the other (Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and not DST), and/or within the European Union (EU) and/or European Free Trade Association (EFTA). Each data centre may be part of only one server farm. You can reassign a data centre from one server farm to another but not on a short term basis (ie not within 90 days of the last assignment).