The Console

Posted by Dan Chu
Vice President, Emerging Products and Markets

We depend on software licensing policies to enable the use and unlock the benefits of new technology.   This is especially true when the new technology – like virtualization – provides transformational benefits in leveraging resources, gaining new efficiencies, and enabling new processes that substantially improve on the old. 

Vendors can evolve their licensing to allow customers to take advantage of new technology, or conversely vendors can hold back and seek to inhibit and restrict how customers can use new technology because they feel threatened by it.  Customers have adopted virtualization broadly and made it mainstream, and have been able to drive some significant changes and improvements in licensing and openness.  However, there are also a growing number of areas where specific vendors (Microsoft in particular) are threatening to use licensing to restrict and undercut the benefits that customers and the industry are gaining from virtualization. 

Virtualization and Licensing:  What’s Been Addressed/Improved

Licensing Based on Virtual CPUs/Sockets: We’ve seen customers drive substantial changes to virtualization licensing to accommodate the new efficiencies that virtualization enables.  IBM Software, BEA Systems, and Microsoft are among the major vendors who’ve moved to licensing based on the number of virtual processors or sockets that an application instance uses, as opposed to the number of physical processors or sockets. 

For the customer who is running a SQL Server database or BEA WebLogic application server instance in a one- or two-CPU virtual machine on a four-socket, eight-core machine, this makes great deal of sense (and economic difference). 

Open Virtual Machine Disk Formats: We’ve also seen customers and vendors drive virtual machine disk formats to be made open and freely usable.   The virtual machine disk format specification describes and documents the virtual machine environment and how it is encapsulated, and this specification is critical to how virtual environments are provisioned, manipulated, patched, updated, scanned and backed up by ISVs and customers.   

In April of this year, VMware announced that we were making our virtual machine disk format, VMDK, openly available and freely usable to anyone who wanted to do so.  Since then, over 2000 vendors and developers have requested to review and use our VMDK specification. 

Last month Microsoft announced that it too is moving to make its virtual machine disk format, VHD, more open.  Previously VHD had been covered by a much more restrictive license.   The ecosystem has invested broadly in VMDK, but it is good that the VHD format is now much more accessible. 

Virtualization and Licensing:  What’s Being Threatened

Licensing Restrictions on Which Operating Systems can be Virtualized: Microsoft has also recently announced a prohibition on virtualizing the less expensive versions of Vista.  Their explanation is that virtualization is not broadly usable by consumers or other mass market users, and therefore should be restricted only to the more expensive versions of Vista. 

This contention stands in stark contrast to the several million users of software like VMware Workstation and VMware Player who have adopted virtualization for their general purpose desktops.  There has been broad criticism of this policy from customers and industry observers (like from David Berlind of ZDNet) who have been clear that such moves to arbitrarily inhibit the use of operating systems are unacceptable. 

Licensing Restrictions on Which Vendor’s Product a Virtual Machine Can Be Run On: One area we are concerned about is that Microsoft has begun to put restrictive terms on the use of published VHDs.  Specifically, Microsoft is starting to restrict use of their VHDs to MS Virtual Server and Virtual PC only (an example is the EULA that accompanies this download).   

In contrast, there are over 300 virtual appliances available on VMware Technology Network (ranging from Oracle databases to CRM packages to firewalls to email security solutions to operating systems) that are freely downloadable and usable by any user regardless of platform or product. 

Microsoft recently published 30-day evaluation VHDs for Exchange, SQL Server, and Windows Server.  We have been told directly by Microsoft that users are allowed to run these VHDs with VMware products that can run VHDs (which includes the broad range of VMware products from VMware Player to VMware Workstation to VMware Infrastructure). 

But it is still troubling to see language from Microsoft that seemingly restricts VHD usage to only Microsoft products.  Customers and partners have been very clear that a closed system based on licensing restrictions that locks customers into one vendor’s products and formats is not acceptable, and we look forward to Microsoft changing its published guidelines.

Proprietary APIs and Lock-In for Communication between the Virtual Machine Operating System and the Hypervisor: Microsoft is implementing proprietary APIs, called Enlightenments, between the Windows Server Longhorn operating system and the new hypervisor product that Microsoft is developing.  APIs between the operating system and the hypervisor, generally referred to as paravirtualization, are a key lever for communication and optimization for virtualized environments. 

There has been strong cross-vendor work in the Linux community, including IBM, VMware, XenSource, Red Hat, and others, toward a public, open approach to Linux paravirtualization.   This looks like it is progressing nicely with lots of third-party support. 

Last week Microsoft and Novell announced that they would work to leverage proprietary Microsoft paravirtualization APIs, in which Novell would pay Microsoft a share of their revenue from their open source Linux operating system.  While on the surface this announcement seems to promote interoperability between Linux and Windows, it is actually not so good for customers. It basically ties Linux into proprietary Windows APIs and allows Microsoft to impose a tax on open source software.  It is in the best interests of customers to run their operating systems, both Windows and Linux, on hypervisors that use open standards and APIs, and do not lock in with proprietary interfaces.