Software licensing in a virtualized world

I'm David Berlind with ZDNet and today we're going to talk about software licensing in a virtualized world and how the two can sometimes be in conflict with each other.

Now, let's talk about your typical virtualized PC and why you'd want to do that and how it works. The two main terms you need to understand when I'm talking about virtualized PCs are "host" and "guest". Now, your host operating system on a virtualized PC is just like 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, for example you could run a completely separate copy of Windows on top of Windows or on top of the Mac. You can actually run multiple virtual machines ...or guests, on top of any host.

Depending on who you get your virtualization technology from, you're going to have different capabilities. Some companies support different hosts and others support different guests, for example if you get your virtualization technology from Microsoft it will work differently than the technology from Parallels or from VMWare or from XenSource or Virtuozzo. Those are some of the different providers, there are others. But the main thing is that when you want to put some software into your computer, virtualization technology has quite a few benefits.

So let's say you have different software packages that you're going to put on your computer. Let's say you download some sort of communications software from the Internet. Or, let's say you're running an office productivity software, or let's say you're going to run some sort of database program, or how about an email program. In all of these cases you don't necessarily have to run these on your host. You can actually run them in one of these.

So say you're running some communications software that you downloaded from the Internet and you don't want it to interfere with your host operating system or anything you're running on it there, you can run it in this version of Windows, this virtual machine that's running Windows. And you can run this copy of Office here in this other copy of Windows. And maybe you want to run this database in this Virtual Machine, or maybe one that's running Linux.

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 is problematic...like let's say you downloaded this communications software. It's some third-party. You don't know them, they're not very reputable, and it turns out not to work very well. Well, when you run it inside of this Windows Virtual Machine, you can just basically delete the whole virtual machine from the system as though it never existed.

Why is that really cool? Well, if you put it on this computer and then you uninstalled it because that's really your only choice to get rid of it, it leaves all sorts of interesting and unwanted artifacts on this computer that will eventually lead to this computer's instability. And, at some point you have to wipe it out and start all over again. That's not optimal.

What you'd like to be able to do is uninstall the software so no artifacts are left behind on the system, and your host stays relatively clean. That's one of the really key benefits of virtualization technology.

What are the downsides? Well, let's say you're running Microsoft Office, let's say you're running Windows inside one of these or multiple ones, the problem is that to license that software, there's no way to buy 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 and over and over again, even though it's all running on the same PC.

So what we have here is a conflict between software licensing and virtualization. And the idea is, we need to figure out how, if I want to run Windows on multiple virtual machines, I can do that without having to pay the software provider multiple times. I think what's going to happen is eventually the people who use all this software out there, they're going to put pressure on different software companies out there like Microsoft, and say, "Hey look it's running on one PC even though I have multiple copies, I should only pay once."

For ZDNet, I'm David Berlind.