HEROware: Time to talk about MS Licensing - by Lynn Shourds

Hey All - this is Lynn Shourds, President & CTO of HEROware. I'm seeing a lot of activity lately on blog posts, internet IT chat rooms, and online help sites about how to handle the different versions of Microsoft licensing when failing over or moving a production server to another server.

Now, normally I try to keep these posts fairly generic, but today I'm going to inject a lot about HEROware specifically.

When you use a HEROware BCA or VBCA, we replicate the entire server image to our appliance. In doing so we are taking over the OS, Apps, System State, Data and everything that resides on that original production server (if you choose to take everything). We are replicating all this information in real-time so you have an up-to-the-second copy of your entire production server sitting on our appliance, just waiting so you can recover data or fail-over and recover an entire image on our appliance.

With Microsoft licensing such as Full packaged product, Volume Licensing, Open Licensing, etc., when a production server is failed-over to our BCA or VBCA, the licenses for both the OS and the Microsoft apps all fail-over without a hitch. These licenses are not bound to the hardware.

However, if the original production server licensing is purchased as Microsoft OEM licensing, then this type of license is bound to the original production hardware. Therefore, when we fail-over or restore to one of our appliances, we are bound by the licensing agreement Microsoft has with the original OEM manufacturer. So, in this case (as in all cases of moving this type of license no matter what product you are using) after failover you MUST call Microsoft and advise them of the fail-over scenario so they can "bless" and correctly license this move.

Although this is a pain in the tush, until Microsoft makes any changes to this configuration we all have to go through this extra step. But, if you look at it with open eyes you'll realize that even though you had to take that extra step, having the ability to fail-over and continue production surpasses the minor inconvenience of having to make that call.

Thanks for listening,

Lynn
>check us out at http://www.heroware.com/