Microsoft volume licensing to let you swap iron for clouds

And back again should you so desire

By John Oates, 17th May 2011

5 ways to prepare your advertising infrastructure for disaster

Microsoft is relaxing its volume licensing rules to allow customers to move existing servers to the clouds without paying extra.

Dubbed "license mobility", the changes come into effect 1 July.

The changes are for customers with Volume License deals through Software Assurance for Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft SharePoint Server, Microsoft Lync Server, Microsoft System Center servers, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

These customers can move their software to a shared cloud provider without paying extra.

Microsoft reckons the changes will make life easier for service providers as well as CIOs wishing to try cloud services without re-licensing products.

Should it all go wrong, the changes will also allow businesses to move their software back in-house if the cloud deal goes wrong – you can move the licence every 90 days.

As ever with Microsoft's licensing tweaks, the devil is in the detail: there's more from Microsoft here, and please let us know your experiences in comments below. ®

5 ways to prepare your advertising infrastructure for disaster

Microsoft’s Cloud OS

System Center Virtual Machine manager and how this product allows the level of virtualization abstraction to move from individual physical computers and clusters to unifying the whole Data Centre as an abstraction layer.

5 ways to prepare your advertising infrastructure for disaster

Being prepared allows your brand to greatly improve your advertising infrastructure performance and reliability that, in the end, will boost confidence in your brand.

Reg Reader Research: SaaS based Email and Office Productivity Tools

Read this Reg reader report which provides advice and guidance for SMBs towards the use of SaaS based email and Office productivity tools.

Avere FXT with FlashMove and FlashMirror

This ESG Lab validation report documents hands-on testing of the Avere FXT Series Edge Filer with the AOS 3.0 operating environment.

Email delivery: Hate phishing emails? You'll love DMARC

DMARC has been created as a standard to help properly authenticate your sends and monitor and report phishers that are trying to send from your name..

Search more Resources