Windows Server license by VM - (1 type per cluster, how often?)

[jq3i4h9u]

Hello Windows Server SMEs

Under the Windows Server licensed by VM framework, I have two questions.

1. VMWare clusters. Let's say I have a Cluster made up of 20 physical ESXi hosts
   • 10 of the hosts are high density. Makes sense to allocate them to the DC license
   • 10 of the hosts are low density. Makes sense to allocate on the individual VM basis under the Std license.
   • QUESTION: is this permitted? Or can you only use one license type across a single Cluster?
     
     
2. Licensing by individual VM
   • How often would it make sense to re-analyze your environment in order to refresh your allocations? Would it be monthly? Every 90 days due to the 90-day license reassignment rule?
     
     • From a compliance standpoint, these decisions would need to be very well documented across time to be able to go back in time to prove that your allocations were based on good, provable logic at any point in time. Thus again, this raises the main question - how often should a SAM team re-analyze and re-allocate/re-map the licensing when choosing to license by individual VM?

Thank you for reading

[RWG2022]

In the example you gave of 1 cluster with 20 physical hosts, do you have vMotion enabled to allow all Windows Server VMs within the cluster to migrate between the 20 physical hosts or are you using a combination of affinity/anti-affinity rules to restrict placements of some of your Windows Server VMs? You can use both options in Flexera including licensing by host or by VM. This is what I do for my company. You will need to split your licenses in Flexera to do what you have suggested in your example as the product use rights require different settings to be enabled. We then use device groups on the restrictions tab of each license and build a report to load into the license which acts as the device group. A device group essentially means only inventory devices you specify will consume against the license. We use the Windows Server Optimization Report to assess what our Windows Server environment looks like and we review the recommendations it suggests coupled with our many years of licensing knowledge to ensure licenses are assigned in the most optimal way. In a Microsoft audit situation, it is a point-in-time snapshot and the auditor will produce a draft license position using a combination of the data you have shared including your license entitlements. If that position differs to yours, then you challenge it. Hope that helps.

[jq3i4h9u]

Thanks @RWG2022 

• They can migrate freely between any of the 20 hosts.

Can anyone point to specific Microsoft product terms language that says you would need to license all 20 physical host cores? (Similar to the Oracle partitioning policy?)

I have the same idea to use device restrictions based on the Optimization Report in order to re-map low density to Standard and high density to Datacenter. Thanks for validating the idea.

How often do you update the restriction reports based off the Optimization Report since the windows server virtual environment is dynamic by nature? Every 30 days? 90 days?

[RWG2022]

For many years, Microsoft has steered customers down the route of licensing VM hosts with Datacenter licenses as the easy and probably the most expensive option, however there is nothing in the Microsoft Product Terms that states you HAVE to license all the hosts in a cluster. Microsoft gives you the choice of VM host or per VM licensing and the responsibility sits with the end customer to ensure compliance at all times. 

We have only just implemented using device groups, but it was fairly straight forward for us. Our primary DC has hundreds of Windows Server VMs and it worked out cheaper to license the VM hosts with Datacenter licenses as we'd bought the licenses (perpetual) many years ago so are just maintaining SA coverage on them. For other locations where we have single standalone hosts running only a handful of VMs for example, we licensed per VM with Standard edition licenses, again as we'd bought the perpetual licenses many years ago and simply maintain SA coverage. Our estate is fairly static so we don't need to review that often. We plan to review it once per quarter.

With your scenario I foresee this being quite tricky to determine/manage. If you license 10 of the 20 VM hosts with Datacenter for unlimited virtualisation, how are you going to determine which VMs you then license per VM, especially as you have said vMotion is used across the cluster? You could today have a VM that is sat on a host licensed with Datacenter, but tomorrow it migrates to a host which is not licensed with Datacenter which would then require Standard licenses for the VM. This could mean you need to track when every VM migrates and reassess at that point, which would be heavily time consuming.

[jq3i4h9u]

Well, if we're using the Windows Server Optimization report, I imagine we can just run weekly, or bi-weekly. And run that through the allocation adapter to re-map all the current low density hosts to the per-vm method under Standard licensing and the rest toward physical core unlimited virtualized datacenter licensing.

[RWG2022]

If you are using a business adapter then it will more than likely be easier. I created our device groups manually using reports as I don't have any experience with business adapters.