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kasper
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Windows Server 2008 Guest - Microsoft Licensing

Greetings,

I would greatly appreciate any information regarding what type of license to get in order

to run Windows 2008 server as a guest under ESX 3.x. I have purchased a copy and

have a license code but I am hestant to use it until I understand how the process works.

Supposedly you are licensed for 4 or 5 2008 guests under hyper-v. Does it and how does

it apply to ESX?

Thanks,

Stan

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xcomiii
Contributor
Contributor

As far as I researched about this matter, MS don't care what virtualisation software that is serving your virtual Windows server (it could be ESX, Hyper-V, Xen and so on).

A change from 2003 to 2008, is that in the Standard Edition, MS allows you to 1 physical and 1 virtual instance on the same license. On the Enterprise and Datacenter editions, the rules are the same (4 virtual + 1 physical for the Enterprise, unlimited virtual + 1 physical for the Datacenter). Datacenter is licenced under number of CPU's though.