Tech Report – January 13th

Chris Wolf: Microsoft Licensing Revisions for Virtualization are Imminent. There’s a glitch in the licensing model right now that if you use Hyper-V from inside Server 2008 for your hypervisor you need Server 2008 CALs for every device or user that connects to any of the virtualized servers on that box. (Yes, even if those servers are running Server 2003 or NetWare or Linux.) Obviously if you’re using VMWare as your hypervisor there’s no such requirement. And even weirder, if you use Hyper-V Server no extra CALs are required. Chris links to various primary resources on this and it’s clear that this situation is currently the case. So MS has a problem. They certainly don’t want to be in a position where folks are discouraged from running Server 2008 or where VMWare can claim that it’s cheaper to run ESX than it is to run Hyper-V.
Tim Sneath (of Microsoft): Bumper Crop of Windows 7 Secrets. A very nice rundown of thirty Windows 7 (and, frankly, Vista) features that haven’t been covered to death.
Tim Bray: Mobile Gold. Responding in part to Scoble’s post yesterday that claims that now that Palm has announced their new iPhone-look-and-feel-clone Pre, MS and Nokia are going to be shut out of the Smartphone market in the US moving forward. Bray makes the overall point that even if that’s the case (and people disagree about that), having four solid Smartphone OS vendors (Apple, RIM, Google, Palm) is great for the entire mobile ecosystem.

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