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Can you help me with my software licensing question?

I have a licensed instance of 2003 server standard edition on a physical server. can i also then run a third party virtual instance of the same server on the physical machine... i.e a vmware server with a cloned copy of the server for testing.

or do i need another license for the virtual copy as well?

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STANDARD LICENSING DISCLAIMER:

While SF can give you a decent idea, and more often than not a very good answer, the best place to ask these types of questions is to ask you licensing representative from Microsoft.

With server 2003 you could have the following virtual servers per license:

Standard: 1 VM OR 1 Physical
Enterprise: 4 VM OR 1 Physical
Datacenter: Unlimited VM OR 1 Physical

I'm pretty sure they changed this for 08, but i can't find the 2003 page anymore it all redirects to 2008 R2 so this is purely from memory.

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Zypher
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  • That is also what I recall. The document below has the information for the 2003 time period. Interestingly, it still has the markup info. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBUQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdownload.microsoft.com%2Fdocuments%2Fuk%2Flicensing%2Ffaq%2Fdownloads%2Fvirtual-machine-environment.doc&ei=hYsGTL6pJoGKlwfmwvTaCg&usg=AFQjCNG4PnsDjFIDvAzeShHvJc1RPGIzAw&sig2=LAjeyZveQu2m7u_5L45U0Q – Greg Askew Jun 02 '10 at 16:53
  • +1, correct info; 2008 (& 2008 R2) is different. – Chris S Jun 02 '10 at 17:17
  • The change for 2008 (and 2008 R2) simply take into account the fact that they allow the physical host to be licensed to run as a Hyper-V role in addition to licensing a VM instance or instances. The OS instance on the physical host can only be used to run Hyper-V though. – Helvick Jun 02 '10 at 17:39