Licensing and Virtual Machines

Discussion in 'Other ESET Home Products' started by jmang, Mar 21, 2009.

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  1. jmang

    jmang Registered Member

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    I understand and have been assured by our reseller that in an environment where there are a lot of virtual machines, ESET only counts the VM host as 1 license, no matter how many VMs the host is running.

    So far, that seems to be running for me. I have deployed ESET to many PCs, Servers, notebooks and VM, all of which running Windows. However, the number of machines managed by RA is equal to the number of licenses I bought.

    What is interesting is RA doesn't seem to be able to tell which is VM riding on the Hosts licenses, and which are real machines. So the list of manageable machines in RA is a mixed of VM and real machines on a first come first serve basis.

    How can I see all the physical machines which I have bought licenses for + whatever number of VMs I have?

    Hope someone can help me here.

    Thanks.

    Cheers,
    jmang
     
  2. PRJUS

    PRJUS Guest

    "If something sounds too good to be true it usually is"

    You need a license for each installed instance of ESET which means each instance of Windows no matter how you run it.

    I have yet to come across any antivirus solution that doesn't count licenses like that.
     
  3. jmang

    jmang Registered Member

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    At the moment, it seems to be OK. Meaning, I can still push install to VM's and physical machines - protection and updates are running fine. And I have not exhausted my licenses for physical machines yet.

    Just that RA can't see them. I was thinking RA has a bug or something.

    There are several posts in the forum as well as the Net that ESET licenses their AV on physical machines, not VMs - just like Microsoft does with Windows licenses and SQL Server licenses. And I have made the decision to go with ESET based on not only my reseller words, but the distributor of my country as well.

    I still think there is some limitation in RA.
     
  4. PRJUS

    PRJUS Guest

    Saying that Microsoft licenses Windows based on physical machines is a statement that cannot stand alone.

    You can buy a Datacenter edition of Windows Server and run as many virtual servers on top of the physical server that the Datacenter edition was bought for or you can buy an Enterprise edition of Windows Server and run 4 virtual servers on the physical server that the license was bought for.

    A Standard or Web edition of Windows Server does not allow you to run any virtual servers on top of it without licensing each server separately.

    If you are right it is something that I think that ESET should reconsider because there is no way that they can ever control on which physical machine a virtual server is running and as more and more servers are being virtualized they will lose income and it doesn't really seem fair to buy only one license for each physical server.
     
  5. jmang

    jmang Registered Member

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    I understand where you are coming from. We are in the software business as well.

    I thought perhaps this is the way that ESET wants to differentiate itself. And I thought it's really a smart move. The number of physical servers will not be any lesser even in the face of virtualization.

    In any case, I have email proof that our reseller as well as the country distributor have both assured me that VMs are licensed for ESET as long as it's host is.

    I thought I just checked here to see what responses I can get from the community of ESET users, resellers, and distributors.

    BTW, Windows 2008 Standard Edition does allow 1 free instance of Hyper-V VM. :)
     
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