Microsoft makes more virtualisation-licensing tweaks
Published: 04 Sep 2008 09:02 BST
Gearing up for a big virtualisation event next week, Microsoft on Wednesday announced another round of changes to its lineup of virtualisation policies and products.
Among a series of changes being rolled out is the ability for businesses to allow their corporate PC image to be run in a virtual machine on PCs owned by employees or contractors.
To pave the way for this, Microsoft announced that either option is now covered under an existing licensing programme that costs $110 (£62) per PC, per year. Workers with desktop PCs that only need occasional remote access to their work PC image can achieve this under a new licence that costs $23 extra per PC, per year, provided the computer in question is also part of Microsoft's Software Assurance programme.
These changes, according to Microsoft's Scott Woodgate, are being made to make sure that Microsoft's licensing policies are not stifling businesses' creativity.
In another licensing shift, Microsoft will enable hosters to stream versions of a third-party software using its technology. Of course, businesses will still need to make sure the third-party software in question can be properly licensed in that way.
Microsoft also announced a new version of its SoftGrid technology, now known as App-V (short for application virtualisation). Although hardware virtualisation, which moves computing tasks from one server to another, has received the most attention to date, Woodgate said that application virtualisation is poised to be big on the desktop.
"Application virtualisation, for us, is as important on the desktop as hardware virtualisation is on the server," Woodgate said.
Separately, VMware noted on Wednesday that its VMware ESX hypervisor was certified under the recently announced Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program, which means that Microsoft will now support software running inside a VMware virtual machine as it would if the program was running outside a hypervisor.
Previously, Microsoft had typically required that any problem a customer encountered be reproduced outside a hypervisor in order to get support — a major thorn in the side of customers that rely heavily on virtualisation.
Credit: Redmond's virtualization shift continues from CNET News
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