openstack team mailing list archive

[JR <botemout@xxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings,

I know that this topic has been touched upon in another forum thread 
(http://www.mail-archive.com/openstack@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/msg20032.html)
but I'd like to get the community's feedback on what I've been told 
about windows licensing on openstack by our IT people, who've had calls 
with MS.

Apparently, there is no way to license a single windows VM running on 
openstack.  The only way to legally (!)  license windows in a cloud is 
to buy a datacenter license. This license which would apply to each 
physical compute node.  Let's say that the cost for that license is 
$4600.  In our environment, since we need high availability and any 
particular windows VM would need to run on any of our 4 compute nodes, 
we'd be in ~$18400.  The above would allow us to run an unlimited number 
of windows OSes.

The problem, for us, is that we only need to run a few odd, but critical 
windows instances.  $18400 is pretty steep and we'd love to just pay for 
the VMs individually.  Does anyone know how to do that?  Is it obvious 
to anyone that my information is (obviously) incorrect?

Thanks much,
JR