Can you help me with my software licensing issue?

Question

I have a question regarding software licensing. Can the Server Fault community please help with the following.

• How many licenses do I need
• Is this licensing configuration valid
• What CALs do I need to be properly licensed
• Can I run this product in a virtual environment

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Note: The idea of this question is so we can close all future licensing questions as duplicates of this question.

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Answer 1

Licensing is a hard and absolutely vendor-specific problem. Not only that, many vendors, especially the larger ones like Microsoft, have multiple types of licensing regimes that change things based on:

• How large you are
• What industry you're in (non-profits, education, government, large corporation, small corporation, and SOHO are all discrete licensing categories with their own quirks)
• How much licensing you purchase
• What kind of contract you buy
• Where you are located or where the licenses will be deployed

Especially for the larger companies like Microsoft, licensing is its own career-track and one that more and more often is not found in the SysAdmin office. It is found in either your Purchasing office, your value-added-reseller's office, or the LargeCorp's sales office.

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In our company we have one person who specializes in purchasing IT license-bearing software. She handles Microsoft and Adobe licensing, as well as a host of other complex entities like ESRI, MatLab, Apple, Novell, and AutoCAD. It is her entire job to know these things and we've made significant savings because she can focus her whole effort into figuring the fiddly bits out. It has saved us a lot of money. She is neither Server person or Desktop person. When license-servers need setting up I do that, but she provides the license keys that goes into them and all of the legal mucking about that does into obtaining them in the first place.

She's a licensing person, and is mostly the kind of person who can answer these questions. I'm not, neither are people like me. But even she would be hard pressed to answer questions for a 30 person small business, since she spends her entire day enmeshed in a large, public (and therefore governmental) higher-ed organization that has completely different licensing options.

Answer 2

One of my duties used to be (Yay! passed it on to someone else, finally!) dealing with licenses. Every so often, I'd have to dive into licensing and figure out how it worked for some vendor or another.

With Microsoft, it was about every two years: I'd talk to our reseller(s), read whatever I could find, ask questions at seminars and webcasts, and figure out what the optimal strategy was and we'd follow that as long as possible, until the situation changed. For most other vendors, it was similar, except the stakes were lower - the cost of licenses was much less, so if we ended up with extras, or a sub-optimal upgrade strategy, it wasn't as big a deal.

The point is that in order to answer your questions for my environment, I had to put in at least a couple weeks of effort every year - and that's for a network I was intimately familiar with. There's no way to shortcut that effort by asking here.

Answer 3

Please ask your local reseller - they will be much better informed than the Server Fault community are.

Your reseller will know all about the licensing intricacies, and usually have contacts within the appropriate organisation to get a definitive answer. They will also know of any special offers, restrictions or other licensing oddities that exist in your country or local area.

Software licensing is a very complex and vendor specific topic, and as such we do not generally answer licensing queries as they have no legal standing.

If you ever go through an audit with a software publisher, an email from them (or your reseller) is going to be much more credible in the event of any discrepancies than a post on a community based Q&A site will be.

Answer 4

I know this is not the usual answer, but I felt this POV should appear somewhere in the responses. If you decide to use only free software, then in addition to the expected benefits of never being artificially constrained by your choice of software, deprived of information necessary to make it work, or unable to lawfully share it with others who would benefit from it, you get the handy side-effect of never having to worry about software licensing audits, licence counts, or licence terms (unless you redistribute software, in which case there are certain conditions, but they're very easily satisfied).

A long time ago I decided as both a personal and a commercial proposition to use only free software. If I couldn't do it with free software, at home or at work, it wasn't worth doing. My life became immensely simplified and I've never regretted the decision.

Answer 5

For Microsoft licensing, this is a helpful resource to get some idea of how their schemes work in broad details, which will be some help to understand what is going on when you contact a local microsoft specialist and they start asking all kinds of questions rather than just giving you a simple price.