A little while ago Gabrie van Zanten (aka Gabes Virtual World) asked me a question about how you license Microsoft products in a cloud? Specifically he wanted to know how VMware states “You can bring your own licenses to the cloud”.
Lets take a look at this. Currently VMware has two cloud offerings: VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) and Dedicated Cloud. The key differences here is that a Virtual Private Cloud is multi-tenant. You are logically separated from other consumers of the service. A dedicated cloud on the other hand is each customer is hosted on physically isolated servers, away from other customers. Its exactly that, its your dedicated cloud. This has an impact on how you license your apps and OS’s.
So back to licensing, how does it differ across the two services:
Operating Systems – Microsoft requires all customers on multi-tenant public cloud environments to purchase the Windows Server licenses from the cloud service provider. If you import a VM or vApp into a vCHS VPC, VMware will automatically detect the presence of Microsoft Operating Systems and bill you accordingly in compliance with Microsoft’s Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA). In this scenario, you would authenticate your Windows Server instances against VMware’s Key Management Server. This enables you to re-purpose the license keys of the instances you imported for other purposes. However in a Dedicated cloud, you are not using a multi-tenant public cloud, you are using dedicated resources in a public cloud, which allows you to bring your own, and activate accordingly.
Applications – Microsoft’s License Mobility program enables customers with Volume License Agreements and Software Assurance to move most server-based applications to Authorized Mobility Partner’s multi-tenant and dedicated clouds (See: License Mobility Through Software Assurance). You must first determine if the applications you want to move are eligible (See: Product Use Rights – Appendix “Software Assurance Benefits”) and have coverage under Software Assurance. Within 10 days of deployment, submit the License Verification Form (See: Document Search – Choose License Verification, Common Document) to your Microsoft representative or the reseller that sold your volume license.
You can bring your own licenses for
- Microsoft SQL Server (Standard and Enterprise)
- Microsoft Sharepoint Server
- Microsoft Exchange Server
- Microsoft Lync Server
This also doesn’t just apply to Microsoft applications, think about Oracle. Oracle license their products on a per processor basis, so you need to consider what kind of cloud environment your going to be running in. If you move an Oracle database to a VPC for example, how many physical processors could be providing resources to all the tenants? You wont know, or wont want to know when the bill comes in. In a dedicated cloud, this can be specified, so you know exactly how to license your product accordingly. Food for thought?
Anyway, back to the Microsoft specific VMware has released a white paper on this question, and provides a nice in-depth understanding to the requirements for licensing. Its definitely worth a read if your thinking about moving your workloads to the cloud and are concerned about licensing. View the white paper here.
[…] Bring Your Own Licenses to the Cloud […]