Licensing a virtualization environment has never been an easy task, either because of the Microsoft licensing model, or because of the applications running on a virtual environment. But when virtualization became popular, and more and more companies started to virtualize their workloads, vendors started facilitating the licensing model for virtualization. Microsoft followed this trend, and in the Windows Server 2012, Microsoft changed the licensing model for Windows Server completely, directly impacting virtualization.
In this chapter we will cover the following topics:
Virtualization licensing in the early days of Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2
Virtualization licensing on Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2
Benefits of Software Assurance on virtualization
Hyper-V Replica impact on virtualization
Licensing Linux VMs on Hyper-V
Before we go through any details on licensing itself...