Comments on: How to: License Microsoft Windows Server in a VMware environment – Part 1

By: Unlimited virtualization rights price breakeven point for Windows Server | Servers and Storage | TechRepublic.com

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 20:19:38 +0000

[...] start the cost savings, but unless you are consolidating at 10:1 or higher, datacenter costs more. For one virtualization integrator, Erik Scholten, his price model put it at 7:1 to make sense. You should also consider that unlimited virtualization rights is not just for Windows Server 2008 [...]

By: Eric K. Miller

Eric K. Miller — Tue, 25 May 2010 03:55:34 +0000

Unfortunately, for service providers trying to use their SPLA licenses, there are enough restrictions to make someone go bonkers. For instance, Microsoft says that SPLA licenses can't be used in conjunction with volume licenses, retail licenses, etc. So, customers who are transitioning from an on-premise environment to a hosted environment (the majority of companies are doing this slowly) must use “only” SPLA licenses “or” volume licenses or retail licenses at the hosted site. To gain the benefit of the hosted environment, most companies would prefer to use SPLA licensing for “new” software, but would still like to use some of their existing expensive volume or retail licenses during a slow transition to a hosted environment. Why should these volume or retail licenses be thrown away?

So, as much as Microsoft has assisted in providing numerous licensing options for virtual environments (much appreciated), they have continued to create barriers like this for a large part of the market.

By: Edwin

Edwin — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 12:47:28 +0000

I found the retail prices for Windows 2008 editions without CALs combined to it:

Prices are for US but good to compare and see where the break even point is situated.
Standard edition: $726,-
Enterprise edition: $2.358,-
Datacenter edition: $ 2.405,-

Using these numbers the break even point will be @ 8 virtual machines and above on a 2 cpu socket machine.

Source: http://www.microsoft.com/Windowsserver2008/en/u...