I'm David Berlind with ZDNet and today we're going to talkabout software licensing in a virtualized world and how the two can sometimesbe in conflict with each other.
Now, let's talk about your typical virtualized PC and whyyou'd want to do that and how it works. The two main terms you need tounderstand when I'm talking about virtualized PCs are "host" and"guest". Now, your host operating system on a virtualized PC is justlike the operating system that you run on your existing PC today. For example,your host operating system might be Windows or it could be a Mac.
Your guests could be a variety of operating systems, forexample you could run a completely separate copy of Windows on top of Windowsor on top of the Mac. You can actually run multiple virtual machines ...orguests, on top of any host.
Depending on who you get your virtualization technologyfrom, you're going to have different capabilities. Some companies supportdifferent hosts and others support different guests, for example if you getyour virtualization technology from Microsoft it will work differently than thetechnology from Parallels or from VMWare or from XenSource or Virtuozzo. Thoseare some of the different providers, there are others. But the main thing isthat when you want to put some software into your computer, virtualizationtechnology has quite a few benefits.
So let's say you have different software packages thatyou're going to put on your computer. Let's say you download some sort ofcommunications software from the Internet. Or, let's say you're running anoffice productivity software, or let's say you're going to run some sort ofdatabase program, or how about an email program. In all of these cases youdon't necessarily have to run these on your host. You can actually run them inone of these.
So say you're running some communications software that youdownloaded from the Internet and you don't want it to interfere with your hostoperating system or anything you're running on it there, you can run it in thisversion of Windows, this virtual machine that's running Windows. And you canrun this copy of Office here in this other copy of Windows. And maybe you wantto run this database in this Virtual Machine, or maybe one that's runningLinux.
Now the real great benefit is no matter where you run these,they don't interfere with each other, and let's say one of them isproblematic...like let's say you downloaded this communications software. It'ssome third-party. You don't know them, they're not very reputable, and it turnsout not to work very well. Well, when you run it inside of this Windows VirtualMachine, you can just basically delete the whole virtual machine from thesystem as though it never existed.
Why is that really cool? Well, if you put it on thiscomputer and then you uninstalled it because that's really your only choice toget rid of it, it leaves all sorts of interesting and unwanted artifacts onthis computer that will eventually lead to this computer's instability. And, atsome point you have to wipe it out and start all over again. That's notoptimal.
What you'd like to be able to do is uninstall the softwareso no artifacts are left behind on the system, and your host stays relativelyclean. That's one of the really key benefits of virtualization technology.
What are the downsides? Well, let's say you're runningMicrosoft Office, let's say you're running Windows inside one of these ormultiple ones, the problem is that to license that software, there's no way tobuy one copy and run it and all of these virtual machines at the same time.Instead you have to buy one copy for this Virtual Machine, one for this one,one for this one, one for that one... and you have to buy the software over andover and over again, even though it's all running on the same PC.
So what we have here is a conflict between softwarelicensing and virtualization. And the idea is, we need to figure out how, if Iwant to run Windows on multiple virtual machines, I can do that without havingto pay the software provider multiple times. I think what's going to happen iseventually the people who use all this software out there, they're going to putpressure on different software companies out there like Microsoft, and say,"Hey look it's running on one PC even though I have multiple copies, Ishould only pay once."
For ZDNet, I'm David Berlind.
