Mike D’s Blog

This news is big. Just 5 days ago I was talking about how important license mobility is in the cloud environment. Today, VMware and Novell announced that VMware will offer full support from VMware GSS no less for SUSE Linux. You can call VMware’s toll-free number and get support for the OS and the virtualization environment in one stop. What’s even better is this announcement also makes it so you can transfer your SUSE environments from your enterprise to a VMware powered cloud without having to worry about licensing constraints. That’s huge on all accounts.

As part of this partnership VMware will also begin to standardize the appliances we’re shipping on SUSE Linux. Previously a lot of the appliances that went out the door were on CentOS because of the rather generous redistribution rights. With the new VMware-SUSE partnership we can now standardize on a more main-stream Linux distribution that’s supported throughout the enterprise.

Good news all around. I just hope we continue the push with other Linux vendors that are out there or they at least follow suit with the license mobility aspect of this announcement. You can read more about the announcement on the VMware News site.

Tags: Licensing, Linux, Support

One of the 3 cloud killers is licensing. The others are comfort and compliance in case you’re wondering. More on that later. Licensing is the one that’s most often overlooked by most people implementing or consuming the cloud today. People often confuse a serial number with a license and think that just because they put a valid serial number in they’re ok. The truth is much different than that. In reality most of the times a license is an agreement or a piece of paper and “licensing” a piece of software is often referred to as “assignment”. The act of assigning a license is usually as complicated as pointing to a server or a piece of software with your finger and saying “you are now assigned a license”. Yup, that’s about all it takes. What you might not realize is these licenses are actually governed by many carefully crafted legal documents that tell you in really small print what you’re allowed or not allowed to do with that license. Sometimes these are EULAs (End-User License Agreements) and often those EULAs refer back to some other legal documents with even more terms and conditions. Now how many of us actually go off and read all of those terms and conditions? I thought I wouldn’t see many hands there.

So why did I just go on a rant about all of this license assignment? Simple, it’s because most people are probably breaking a lot of these agreements when using the cloud. Before I proceed any further I want to stipulate something:

• I am not a lawyer or pretend to be one
• These are my own opinions and do not reflect my employer’s thoughts
• This is not legal advice of any manner
• You should always consult the vendor of the license on the proper ways to consume their licensing

OK. With that said, let’s continue with an example of Microsoft. I bring them up because Amazon and Microsoft announced a pilot to allow the migration of licenses from the enterprise to the cloud a while back. Yes, both are competitors to VMware but what they announced is very important. Before the announcement if you wanted to take a Windows VM that you were running in house and move it to the cloud then it would cause all sorts of problems for the service provider and their licensing compliance. Today, the only legal way to license a VM if you are a service provider is either the outsourced model or the pay per VM model. In the outsourced model the service provider is required to dedicate the hardware that a customer’s Windows VM lands on only to that customer. Think of dedicated hosting if you will. Only that customer can use that hardware. This sort of kills scalability in the cloud. The other way is for the service provider to own the license and then lease it to the customer on a monthly basis. Then the service provider can use all of their shared infrastructure together to host multiple customers. Of course this is bad for the customer that has an ELA with Microsoft because they now have to essentially pay for their licenses again without the ability to leverage their ELA.

So what did Amazon and Microsoft do? They are now allowing customers to take their existing licenses under ELA and migrate those licenses to the cloud for use. The other benefit is the customer can do this while the service provider still gets to use shared infrastructure. It’s a win-win and knocks down a major hurdle to cloud adoption. There are all sorts of requirements to be met and caveats to this plan so make sure you go and read the announcement which has all the details around pricing and terms and such.

I’m sure we’ll start to see many other vendors start to change their licensing policies. Only you, the consumer of these licenses can put the necessary pressure on your vendors to make this happen so reach out to your favorite ISV and get them to start thinking about how they will allow the mobility of licenses to the cloud.

Tags: amazon, Cloud, Licensing, Microsoft

IBM and Amazon Web Services have partnered to allow developers to use Amazon EC2 to build and run a range of IBM platform technologies, the companies announced today. The new ‘pay-as-you-go’ model provides development and production instances of IBM DB2, Informix Dynamic Server, WebSphere Portal, Lotus Web Content Management and Novell’s SUSE Linux operating system on EC2.

Developers can use their existing IBM licenses on Amazon EC2 or use new Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that IBM is making available at no charge for development and test purposes, enabling software developers to quickly build applications based on IBM software within Amazon EC2. In coming months, Amazon will introduce production AMIs running IBM services, enabling users to purchase these services by the hour.

(Via Data Center Knowledge.)

My comments.

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As has been reported by Andrew Dugdell and James O’Neill, Microsoft has updated their licensing policy so you don’t need Windows Server 2008 CALs if you’re just running a bunch of Windows 2003 or other non-Windows Server 2008 based VMs.

The issue of needing Windows Server 2008 CALs was first brought to light by the VMware competition team back in mid-December. I also reported on it the next day.

Microsoft has now updated their policy. In a nutshell you no longer need Windows Server 2008 CALs if you’re accessing non-Windows Server 2008 VMs on a host that’s only used for virtualization. Full documents outlining the changes can be found here.

I have to applaud Microsoft for changing things around so quickly. They continue to do a good job changing their licensing to work better with virtualization technologies. Now if we can just get the to concentrate on the desktop side a little and change VECD to be much more economical and allow you to assign VECD and Microsoft Office to users instead of devices.

UPDATE (January 23, 2008) – The VMware competitive team just weighed in with their thoughts on this subject. They pretty much wrote what everyone else did – why this makes sense, this was a good move, etc. However they also wrote about things they’d like to see changed. I’ve pasted that short list below because I’ve heard many customers asking for the same things. Maybe if we all ask together Microsoft might get this message as well.

1) Provide customers an option for all Microsoft OS and application licenses to be assigned to the virtual instance (instead of physical hosts) so customers can take full advantage of VM mobility.
2) Allow third parties (ex. ISVs) to have an ability to distribute demo and production VMDK-based Windows virtual appliances so customers can deploy them in their virtual datacenters.
3) Lift restrictions in VECD where customers must pay a significant premium for virtualized desktops in exchange for “expanded license grants” that they do not necessarily need (or want). Currently, VECD works for a limited number of sophisticated customers, but makes the use of Microsoft products in virtual desktops very expensive for customers seeking simple, uniform deployment of consistent desktop environments.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve seen a trend at customer sites. Nearly every customer I visited in the New York city area told me the same thing when the competition was brought up. It went something like this:

Customer: I would love to use VMware but the cost savings in Windows licenses from Microsoft with Hyper-V makes it a deal I can’t pass up.

Me: What do you mean by that? Licenses cost you the same for Windows no matter what virtualization solution you’re using.

Customer: That’s not what my Microsoft rep told me. They said I could get unlimited virtual machines with Datacenter Edition of Windows only if I used Hyper-V.

Me: Ah. I see. You know, they’re lying to you, right?

Customer: No. They never lie to me. Where’s the proof.

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Wow! This new post by the competition team at VMware is really interesting.

Here’s the scenario: Say someone’s got existing Windows Server 2003 licenses (non-OEM versions) and CALs. He wants to use these licenses and CALs to run a Windows Server 2003 virtual machine. Seems pretty straight forward – as a 2003 CAL is being used to access a Windows Server 2003 environment – and a good way to save money since he’s already paid for the Windows Server 2003 licenses and CALs – right?

Make sure to read the whole post at the source. It’s interesting because there’s a huge, hidden cost to using Hyper-V for shops that aren’t upgrading to Windows Server 2008 right now. I know, some people are going to comment that everyone is upgrading already. No so. As a matter of fact I was just with a customer in Ohio today that is just beginning the process of upgrading from Windows Server 2000 to Windows Server 2003. No, that wasn’t a typo. This is a pretty major customer out there too – not your mom and pop shop.

It will be interesting to see how Microsoft talks its way out of this one. Even if it decides to change it’s CAL model that’s going to be pretty complex. If anyone does have some constructive comments on ways to get around this CAL upgrade requirement I’d love to hear about it. Just drop your info in the comments for all of the readers to hear.

UPDATE (January 18, 2008) – Microsoft has recently changed their licensing structure so you don’t need Windows Server 2008 CALs anymore if you’re accessing non-Windows Server 2008 VMs. Read more here.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any better – VMware is offering Fusion 2.0 for 50% off. Just go here and use the code “CyberMondayDeal”.

For agitated Parallels users you can even use the $30 competitive rebate and combined with the deal above you can get Fusion for $9.99. Yes, $10 to switch to VMware.

One of the nice things about virtual machines is they are portable. That’s one of the reasons people virtualize – they find it easier to do HA and DR. Of course there’s a downside to portability since it’s easy to give your friend down the street a copy of your software. As we all know, that’s illegal.

While not directly the same thing there’s an interesting thing going on with Microsoft blacking out the background for pirated copies of Windows. It seems to have hit China the hardest although anyone using Windows illegally should be affected. I really love one user’s reaction to the screen being blacked out.

“If, when I’m programming, the computer screen goes black, that will probably cause some important information to be lost,” another commenter wrote. “Who will pay me for my loss then?”

Uh, let’s see. You didn’t pay Microsoft for the software and yet you want them to pay you if you lose data when a warning to buy a legal copy appears? I guess if that made it to a US court they just might side with you (yes, it’s gotten that bad here in the US).

But this begs the question, when is a user really a user? I mean do you count someone who pirates your software but is using it in your customer base? What about support for that user? Personally I’m with Microsoft 100% on this one. If you don’t like the price of the software then go find an alternative. There’s plenty of free Linux out there which is VERY usable.

Microsoft licensing keeps Windows out of virtual appliances: “Now that the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) is available, increasingly more applications will be packaged as OVF-based virtual appliances. But don’t hold your breath for virtual appliances based on Microsoft Windows, observers say.”

(Via SearchServerVirtualization.)