I think it makes sense for Microsoft to charge for virtual licenses. I may not like it. I may find it irritating. And I would definitely prefer to receive my software for free, as long as I still had all the attached benefits. It also makes sense for them to offer incentives when you use their products over their competitors. It's just smart business. Again, if I'm using one of their competitors it is annoying.

It's my opinion that since they are a smart business that they will continue to develop licensing terms for the virtualization market that are increasingly more favorable and equitable.

I work for an I.T. solutions provider and it makes sense that Microsoft would charge for their new virtualization software. I am a little skeptical and afraid of the new virtualizaton and if it stacks up to VMWare who has owned the market for years now.

I am also a bit skeptical of targeting existing microsoft users that are already using VMWare. It may have just a high kill rate among microsoft users to try and swade them to Hyper-V as a success rate as VMWare has been such a quality product and solutio for them.

Of course it makes sense for Microsoft to require a license for every instance of their product regardless if it is running on a VM or bare metal. What does not make sense is to require an 'assignment' of the license to physical HW if it is running on a VM. The server landscape has changed, physical servers are becoming less relevant. Its all about pools of resources now. This is just the M$ way of hindering the competition because they currently dont have the technology to seamlessly move a workload between physical servers. Would they have this policy if they had this capability? They should be taken to court again for anti-competitive practices.

I laugh every time someone implies that the world is virtualized. That's just not the case, yet. VPNs have the highest penetration and use. Server virtualization is still in its infancy, as is app virtualization, storage virtualization, etc.

Server hardware is terribly relevant today. Just look at IBM's announcement of the first supercomputer achieving 1 teraflop. And Intel and AMD now have quad cores shipping in a number of configurations.

In fact, if you want to discuss licensing, how about looking at software licensing policies for multi-core. The ISV community is divided on licensing policies. Some vendors charge per processors (socket), some charge per core, or some charge using a complex calculation. And you can be assured that multi-core processors have a much higher adoption rate and installed base than server virtualization.

To clarify one comment: MS allows the OS and app running in a VM to be moved freely between properly licensed servers. This policy is vendor agnostic and applies to any virtualization software.