Microsoft has a virtualization white paper, too

While waiting for an official Microsoft response to VMware's new whitepaper attacking Microsoft's virtualization licensing and distribution policies, I stumbled across a couple of Microsoft virtualization whitepapers and tools that might be of interest to customers evaluating products in this space.

* Microsoft whitepaper on virtualization licensing,Thirty-two pages of licensing details for customers covered under Microsoft volume-licensing contracts. I'm not even going to try to distill this one. But this is definitely one document that VMware analyzed in preparing its latest critique.

* Microsoft's new Windows Server Virtualization License calculator. The fine print: "(Windows Server) Standard Edition grants the use rights to run a single virtualized instance of Windows Server Standard Edition. Enterprise Edition grants the use rights to run four instances of Windows Server that may be a mix of Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition. Datacenter Edition is licensed per processor and grants use rights to run an unlimited number of virtualized instances of a mix of Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition and Datacenter Edition."