Virtualization, Licensing, and "Cold DR Use Rights"
A couple of months ago Steve Kaplan and I wrote an article for Redmond Magazine on virtualizaiton and licensing. That article hoped to untangle the complicated terms that enable multiple license use in virtualization environments for every physical license purchased. The short answer there is that with Enterprise Edition, you get 4:1 virtual to physical licenses and for DataCenter Edition, you get Unlimited:1.
It also discusses that this limitation goes only for running instances. You can have an unlimited number of non-running instances around.
What we missed in that article is a short, but potentially key clause called "Cold DR Use Rights". According to Eric Ligman in the Small Business Community Blog:
There have been some questions in the past about the “Cold” Disaster Backup Recovery Rights Software Assurance benefit and what it provides. Some of the questions have been about what “Cold” means vs. “hot” and if it is “Cold,” can it be turned on for patch management and testing. The answer to this...
...stated directly in the Product Use Rights document (the document that tells you what your usage rights are for software purchased through Volume Licensing) under the Software Assurance section.In this quarter’s Product Use Rights document, you will find these answers about “Cold” Disaster Backup Recovery Rights located on page 62. Here you will see:
2. “Cold” Disaster Recovery Rights.
For each instance of eligible server software you run in a physical or virtual operating system environment on a licensed server, you may temporarily run a backup instance in a physical or virtual operating system environment on a server dedicated to disaster recovery. The product use rights for the software and the following limitations apply to your use of software on a disaster recovery server.
• The server must be turned off except for (i) limited software self-testing and patch management, or (ii) disaster recovery.
• The server may not be in the same cluster as the production server.
• You may run the backup and production instances at the same time only while recovering the production instance from a disaster.
• Your right to run the backup instances ends when your Software Assurance coverage ends.
As you can see, the “cold” server can be turned on for limited software self-testing and patch management. So the answer to the question above is, “Yes, you can turn on your cold disaster backup recovery server to manage patches so that you are up to date in case of an actual disaster when you would need to utilize the disaster recovery server.”
As you can see above, it is perfectly legal for you to light up those non-running instances from time to time to make sure they're patched and properly tested. This is an excellent clarification!
See the full post at:
http://blogs.msdn.com/mssmallbiz/archive/2007/05/27/2925947.aspx
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