Questions and answers about CAPEX (capitol expenditure) and OPEX (ongoing operating expense) of VDI
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Microsoft Licensing
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 Posted 5:17 PM Wednesday 16 September 2009 Guys,
How do you handle MS Licensing for Windows XP when you deploy VDI? Do you transfer physical desktop licenses over to virtual? If so, how do you handle OEM licenses? What is the cheapest way to license your virtual desktop XP farm? Thank you in advance for your input! |
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Posted 10:56 AM Thursday 1 October 2009
Hi..
From what I understand, to run XP on VDI, you must buy Vista Enterprise (VECD) licenses with Software Assurance, then exercise your downgrade your rights to roll back to XP – could cost a fortune to stick with XP in a Virtual Environment. Brian Madden covered it here http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/brianmadden/archive/2008/09/11/microsoft-makes-more-changes-to-vecd-they-re-still-screwing-us-though.aspx Where a guest commented: Mike Cardinal wrote on 09-11-2008 9:25 AM So if you already "own" an existing XP license at the desktop, and want to connect to a virtual desktop running in the data center, what's the licensing impact? And Brian replied: Brian Madden wrote on 09-11-2008 9:40 AM Oh man... I've got bad news about XP my friend.. XP doesn't have anything like this. To be technically legal, you need to upgrade to Vista Enterprise, enroll those licenses in SA, buy the VECD add-on, and then exercise your downgrade rights to use XP instead. Hope this helps.. Cheers Gaz |
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Posted 4:13 AM Thursday 15 October 2009
To make the discussion more complicated:
Windows XP has nothing in his license agreement that say's you that you may not use XP in a VDI environment and it also does not say that you need to install it on a fixed hardware. If you use XP in a VDI environemnt, Microsoft will not be able to say to you that you need VECD, but it also will not enable you to say to Microsoft that you are allowed to do it. It is a grey area |
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