Over the past 6 months, we have seen a lot of Scottish Partners want information and training on the Microsoft Virtualisation strategy, with some great customer wins.

A number of Partners have provided feedback on the challenge of the need for CALs to access Windows Servers running Hyper-V, and whilst the model of if runs on Windows it needs a CAL make sense, for certain virtualisation project scenarios, this can make it expensive for a customer if they do not have Windows Server 2008 CALs.

With this in mind, Microsoft has just announced changes, to the product use rights, which simplifies the CAL requirements for virtualised scenarios, and we will be in communication to all our Volume Licence customers in the coming weeks - an extract from this communication is below:

Currently, if your physical server environment is running Windows Server 2003, matching version CALs are required for all users (i.e. Windows Server 2003 CALs). However, if you move your physical Windows Server 2003 Operating System Environments (OSE) to run as virtual machines hosted by Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Windows Server 2008 CALs are required. This is per the current use rights. With the change in our licensing policy, Windows Server 2008 CALs are no longer required if you are using Windows Server 2008 solely as a virtualization host. The only exception to this is if you are running Windows Server 2008 virtual machines, which would require Windows Server 2008 CALs.

To help demonstrate the effect of the licensing change, I have included three scenarios below and the resulting requirements.

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If you would like more in depth information on this change, please read the updated Volume Licensing Brief