Chutneytech | UK Technology News

IBM are offering customers who buy its System x rack servers and Bladecenter blade servers the option of Microsoft’s Windows Datacenter, allowing for unlimited virtualization.

Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition (SE) can run on machines with up to four sockets and up to 32GB of main memory on x64-based servers – a more than suitable operating system for blades and most rack servers. Enterprise Edition (EE) gives you a bit more flexibility with up to eight sockets and potentially 2 terabyte’s of memory. SE allows just one virtual machine on a server, and EE allows four, so if you want more, you need to buy more Windows licenses.

Datacenter Edition scales up to 64 sockets for x64 servers and up to 2 terabyte’s, and allows unlimited virtual machines.

In October 2006, Window Server 2003 R2 Datacenter Edition, allowed users to deploy an unlimited number of Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition, or Datacenter Edition VM’s on their machines. Back then Datacenter Edition cost $2,999 per processor socket with no client access licenses (CALs), which cost the user $40 each time.

Windows Server 2008 Datacenter Edition remains the same, price-wise, and still allows for unlimited virtualization. However, now Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor comes with the Standard, Enterprise and Datacenter Editions, which means customers won’t have to buy VMware’s ESX server or Citrix Systems’ XenServer to do virtualization.

What this means is that you can afford to move from EE to Datacenter Edition on two and four socket blade servers, simplifying your software stack (all Windows), and get unlimited virtualization as well.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 27th, 2008 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Servers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.