Outsourcing Software Management Licensing Brief

This March 2023 Outsourcing Software Management Licensing Brief brings together information about changes that happened in October 2019 and October 2022. You’ll find information on using licences with Listed Providers and Authorized Outsourcers, as well as the benefits that enable this: the Flexible Virtualization Benefit, License Mobility through SA, and the Azure Hybrid Benefit. Find this Licensing Brief here: http://bit.ly/3T1nxR7.

License Mobility Verification Guide for Customers

We found an updated (December 2016) guide snappily entitled “License Mobility through Microsoft Software Assurance Verification Guide for Customers”. Essentially, this is a useful document if you want to check out the required processes to use traditional licences with SA to license workloads in the cloud. Its main update covers the fact that you can now email the License Verification form to Microsoft.

Find the guide in the Application Servers section of our Licensing Guides emporium: http://bit.ly/MSLicensingGuides.

Microsoft Hosting and CSP Newsletter

The December 2015 Hosting and Cloud Service Provider newsletter is out.

It’s got links to recent topics of interest in the hosting world: the launch of E5, licensing changes for Windows Server and System Center 2016, and the changes to Licence Mobility for SA rights which allow customers to fail-over to shared hardware.

There are also links to useful CSP resources and the next quarterly licensing webcast on 20 January, 2016.

Sign up for this free newsletter here: http://bit.ly/1iVEvxV.

Changes to Fail-over Rights

These rights are an SA benefit for Dynamics AX Server and SQL Server allowing customers to run passive fail-over instances of the product without additional licences.

Previously, the fail-over instances had to be on a separate OSE on the licensed server or on a different server dedicated to the customer’s use.

New wording added to the December 2015 Product Terms on page 82 confirms that this right is now extended to qualifying shared servers as part of the Licence Mobility through Software Assurance benefit.

Microsoft Licensing and the Google Cloud Platform

Google announced in mid July 2015 that Windows Server 2012 R2 is now supported on the Google Cloud Platform: http://bit.ly/1MxgkST.

Windows Server image pricing starts at $0.02 USD/hour on top of the virtual machine cost. All Windows images are charged for a minimum of 10 minutes and after that are charged by the minute, rounded up to the nearest minute: http://bit.ly/1Pve4Ke. License Mobility for server applications is also supported and Google talks about that here: http://bit.ly/1fkBjJV.