Posted by Carl Eschenbach
Executive Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations
The August 19 announcements from Microsoft are good news for VMware customers. VMware is now part of the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program Program (SVVP), and is happy to work with Microsoft to deliver better support to our many mutual customers. Under SVVP, customers running Windows and Microsoft applications on the VMware ESX hypervisor will receive the support they need from Microsoft, in addition to the support they have enjoyed from VMware. VMware customers can continue to leverage the full flexibility and benefits of using Virtual Infrastructure. VMware is working with Microsoft to certify ESX in the near future.
VMware Infrastructure provides customers with high levels of continuous service for applications, enabling customers to achieve significantly higher hardware utilization, dynamically balance workloads across physical resources, and move applications in real time. VMware collaborates with Microsoft and other ISVs to ensure that our customers have access to product support consistent with the vendor’s policies for traditional physical environments.
VMware, the announcements by MS and the new Volume Licensing langauge still appears to place 90-day restrictions on the Windows OS running on ESX. It appears their langauge and Windows OS “use rights” assume you run Hyper-V on Windows 2008 Enterprise or Datacenter. If we run a Windows OS on ESX, we cannot leverage the “use rights” to run unlimited guests unless we want to run our guests on top of a 2008 guest within ESX – nonsense at best.
@JL. Microsoft’s licensing rules around virtualisation for WIndwos Server are vendor agnostic when it comes to your choice of virtualisation product. If you want to use ESX and enjoy the unlimited virtualisation rights from Windows Server 2008 datacenter edition, then you can – you don’t have to install Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V, all you need to do is assign a Windows Server 2008 Datacenter Edition license to the physical hardware and install ESX, XenServer, or whatever you want to use as your virtualisation platform. After that you have the rights to run unlimited Windows Server 2008 (or earlier) VMs.
This has been made abundantly clear to me by Microsoft on many occaisions.
The new licensing changes relate to the applications running in the VMs.
ESX only, or also ESXi?
Hello, Which date for support Windows Server 2008 x64?
Citrix, Cisco, etc… support this yet.
Thanks.